The Coexistence Of Heterogeneity And Readability In The English Translation Of Changhenge

Wang Anyi’s novel Changhenge relates the historical change of Shanghai from the 1940s to the 1990s through the 40 years’life experience of the heroine--Wang Qiyao. The writer Wang Anyi exquisitely depicts the history, culture, and women of Shanghai from a unique perspective. This novel has received a lot of honorary titles and prizes for its distinctive writing features, rich themes, etc. It is also praised as "an epic of Shanghai" due to its magnificent and fabulous description of the city. In response to its great popularity in China, some translators in the world successively plunged themselves into translating it into other languages. The translation by Michael Berry and Susan Chan was published in 2008 by Columbia University Press. Many mainstream media in America made evaluations on it, and scholars also delivered their opinions of this novel.Given the relatively inferior status of Chinese literature in foreign countries, the author of this thesis is curious about why this novel is a success in America. On the basis of previous studies on this novel at home and abroad as well as the adoption of other effective research methods, the author assumes that Michael Berry and Susan Chan’s success of the translation lies in the fact that they ensured the balance of heterogeneity and readability in translation process. Thus, the translation is well received by western readers while performing the function of introducing Chinese culture to western countries.Through a careful comparison between the original novel and the obtained part of its English translation by Michael Berry, it is found out that Michael Berry mainly resorted to the strategy of foreignization in his translation. He made various attempts to reproduce the heterogeneous literary features and cultural features of the original novel. He preserved the long prosaic descriptions and rhetoric language in his translation, and adopted some foreignization translation techniques like transliteration and literal translation. However, owning to the remarked differences between Chinese culture and western culture, the translator had to make some compromises rather than stubbornly reproduce all elements of the original novel so as to make the translation readable to western readers. The methods taken by Michael Berry to ensure readability are the choice of tense, subsection of dialogues and addition of quotation marks, use of italics, and some translations techniques like paraphrase, parody translation, addition, shift, imitation, etc.Guided by Lawrence Venuti’s theory of foreignization strategy, this thesis tries to illustrate the concrete methods and techniques Michael Berry relied on to couple heterogeneous features and readability in his translation with some representative examples from the English translation, aiming to provide some reference for future translation studies and the foreign introduction of Chinese literature.