A Report On The Translation Of Gay Fictions: Wilde To Stonewall(Chapter 6)

This essay is a report on a translation project, which takes chapter six with the subject of “love, having no geography, knows no boundaries” from Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall—Studies in a Male Homosexual Literary Tradition, which most joyously and lyrically celebrates gay love. This part not only focuses on the very different strategies adopted by Truman Capote and Tennessee William—rather than insisting on the ordinariness of gay people, but also reveals the fact that the Southern writers revel in the extraordinariness of their exotic, frequently grotesque characters. Summers’ s approach to defining the homosexual literature tradition is through the analysis of selected texts, chosen for their literary value and representativeness.The original text, with abundant and violent expressions and metaphors, is the literary criticism with precise and graceful linguistic characteristics of social sciences. As a collection of literary comments, this book is rich in literary rhetoric and implications; the particularity of “gay” also determines the employment of slangs and argots. All of them bring considerable challenges and difficulties to this translation project. These two writers focus on individuals who have been bloodied by life, but who are still actively contending as they struggle against loneliness and isolation. For the sake of adapting the sensitive topic “homosexual” into the traditional Chinese culture, the translator adopts “three dimensional transformations” of “eco-translatology” theory as the guiding principle to cross the barriers of different languages, customs and civilizations. Skills of long sentence deconstruction, literal translation, free translation, amplification as well as omission are employed during the translation process.Homosexual literary discourse is inherently and sometimes triumphantly rooted in political realities and social attitudes, and because many scholars participate in the politics of social changes, there ought to be a study on the homosexual literature to observe the development of the Western politics and social tolerance. The writer of this translation report hopes that the translation of this book will contribute simultaneously both to the acquisition of new knowledge and to a recognition of homosexual recognition in China. As a contribution to literary history, the book scrupulously seeks to maintain historical and critical objectivity, and history and criticism are never entirely objective or merely academic.The translation report consists four parts: 1. introduction to the translation task, including the background and significance of the translation task as well as the theme and style of the source text; 2. the description of translation process—the preparations both in theory and in practice, presenting the basic concepts and latest research achievements of eco-translatology as well as expounding its effects during the translation; 3. case studies: the statement of problems the translator met and solutions he made with proper cases; 4. summary: the experience accumulated from this translation project and problems needed to be solved on account of the insufficient competence and relatively limited understanding of the translator.Although there are 27.2 million homosexuals in China, based on the investigation conducted by the Ministry of Public Health of China, the study of this field is still inadequate with little communication with the international academia. The translator wishes that this translated version could contribute to the development of homosexual research and let more individuals realize “The brain may take advice but not the heart, and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries.”...