Content Configuration And Function Evolution Of Translators’ Prefaces

The years since 1960’s have witnessed momentous changes in the development of translation theory. Those changes manifest themselves in that the focus has shifted from the macro level studies on interlingual transfer to the micro studies on translation behaviors and translators’ participation. Scholars gradually direct their attention to the external factors such as socio-cultural context, ideology, translators’ subjectivity, etc.,aiming at exploring how these factors affect the production and dissemination of the target text. The combination of macro and micro perspectives, of cultural study and linguistic analysis, provides new focus and motivation for the development of translation studies. With the increasing frequency of cultural communication and the cultural turn in translation studies, paratexts, as a fresh topic, come into scholars’ sight step by step. Paratexts are a kind of marginal text, which covers an extensive range from internal texts like titles, covers, inserts, prefaces to external texts like the author’s diaries, interviews or posts. Despite its attribute of being auxiliary, paratexts can also exist independently, which endows it with high research value. However, reviewing the field of translation studies, paratexts have not gained enough attention. Many scholars focus only on one-sided researches on the target text with the effect and intervention of paratexts remaining neglected.Translators’ prefaces, as a branch of translation paratexts, are not only an important tool for delivering information of the original but also a great platform for translators to show their subjectivity. Since ancient times, many translation theories and norms are first put forward in translators’ prefaces For example, Yan Fu’s famous translation principles “faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance” initially appeared in the translator’s preface to Evolution and Ethics. However, due to the loss of some translated versions and translators’ invisibility, the collection and research of translators’ prefaces pose a tough challenge to many scholars, making them shrink back before them. Current researches on translators’ prefaces are mostly confined to theoretical introduction or practical analysis of a single text. The lack of quantity and quality is a real pity for such a valuable research object—translators’ prefaces.The present paper adopts a integrated approach of corpus and genre analysis,collecting translators’ prefaces from Chinese versions of British and American works published by Yilin Press and stored in the library of Jiangnan University to establish a mini-corpus with 168 translators’ prefaces, and attempts to find out common moves of translators’ prefaces, identify their move structure, then elaborates their content,function and evolving tendency by applying the models of move analysis proposed by Swales and Bhatia. First, Generic features and communicative purpose of translators’ prefaces are discussed. Then, the move structure is concluded on the basis of above discussions along with qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. At last, taking as variables the publishing year and discipline that the book belongs to, the frequency of occurrence of each move and average length of each translator’s preface are calculated to distinguish obligatory, conventional and optional moves and summarize the evolving tendency in terms of number and function.The research findings consist of three aspects.Firstly, content of translators’ prefaces can be realized through five moves and several steps, namely, introducing the original, outlining the original, evaluating the original, introducing the translated work, summarizing the process of translation. The first three of them are conventional moves and the latter two are optional moves. No obligatory moves are identified.Secondly, the relationship between content and function is complementary. Based on content analysis, four functions of translators’ prefaces can be identified: the informative function, the explanatory function, the normative function and the delomorphic function, which interinfiltrate and complement with each other.Thirdly, the development of translators’ prefaces presents two tendencies. In quantity, the number of works with translators’ prefaces decreases with the year passing by, proving that translators’ prefaces, as an important medium among readers, authors and translators, still lack attention. However, classifying translators’ prefaces into two categories—literary and non-literary works, the tendency turns out to be different. The number of literary works with translators’ prefaces is in a negative trend while that of non-literary works is in a positive trend, which shows disciplinary variation. From theperspective of function, main functions of translators’ prefaces are sliding from the informative and explanatory to the normative and delomorphic, which reflects that translators’ sense of participation is raised on the one hand and the writing purpose of translators’ prefaces is not only to explain “ the production of a new translation of a classic work” as suggested by Munday(2008:32).The innovation points of the present paper lie in the following two aspects. First,the research corpus is resourceful and representative. The corpus is collected based on a diachronic perspective with a wide time span from 1988 to 2013, effectively avoiding the defect of monotonous mode of corpus. Practically all disciplines are included in the corpus, enriching researches on the non-literary field. The language background is narrowed down to English as original composition, which avoids tremendous differences caused by culture and enhances the convincing effect. Second, the research topic is new and innovative. Taking translators’ prefaces as a research object, content,function, especially the evolving tendency as research focus opens up new paths for future researches and plays an enlightening role in exploring paratexts.The present paper is intended to extend the application of genre analysis to researches on paratexts. The findings are aimed at providing writing instructions and guidance for translators who may compose a translator’s preface in the future, by figuring out content and function of translators’ prefaces. Moreover, it is hoped that the present exploration will be of some new implications for researches on other forms of paratexts.