The Manipulated Image Of Fusang

Based on the Manipulation School's opinion that translation is a kind of manipulation, Dukate proposes that translation activities can be divided into three stages:pre-production stage, production stage, and post-production stage. In addition, there are several forms of translational manipulation:deletion, addition, substitution, and attenuation. Out of political and moral reasons, deletion is frequently used in translating text. Deletion is inevitable in translating a work, but too much deletion will change the style of the work, or even change or manipulate the image of the character in the work.Fusang, a historical novel, is a representative work of Yan Geling. The story takes place against the context of the 1860s in San Francisco Chinatown, and is about the mysterious and beautiful love between a Chinese prostitute Fusang and a white young man Chris. Since the English version of Fusang-The Lost Daughter of Happiness was published, it has become very popular among English readers, and ranked as one of the top 10 best sellers in 2001 in Los Angeles Times. In Fusang, there are discourses concerning the racial inequality between the USA and China revealing the miserable life of Chinese diasporas in the USA. For American readers, these discourses belong to sensitive topics. According to the statistics, studies on The Lost Daughter of Happiness at home and abroad are limited, which is a pity for a novel with such literary value. This study is motivated by the fact that the novel is "a popular book" on "sensitive topics" with "limited scholarly attention".With these three motivations, the author compares the English readers and the Chinese readers' reviews, and has an interesting finding: there are discrepancies in understanding the character Fusang between the English readers and the Chinese readers. In order to find out what contributes to the discrepancies, the author makes a case study on The Lost Daughter of Happiness, reviews the whole process of translating Fusang, and then focuses on comparing the original text and the target text. The finding is that the character Fusang has the characteristics of tolerance, maternity, and tenacity, and no considering social factors, deletion of segments(Yan Geling in an interview that the deleted parts from the original work total 50 pages, which makes the translation soft in style) in the Chinese novel describing Fusang's personality leads to the gap in understanding the character Fusang.As more and more communication between China and other countries is undergoing, the publishing industry has attached more and more importance to translating and publishing Chinese literature. How to promote communication with the other countries through translation becomes a hot issue in Chinese translation circle. This research helps to answer these questions. The purposes of this research are 1) to find out the reasons which explain the gap in understanding the character Fusang between the English readers and the Chinese readers, and enable the English readers to have a better understanding of the novel; 2) to provide a case study for the project of Chinese literature going global and so the collaborators involved in the translation may think about the question of how to handle the deletion translation strategy so as to make the translated image close to the original one.