A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Vanity Fairfrom The Perspective Of Feminist Translation Theory

Feminist translation is a newly-born translation theory in the late 20 th century,which is a combination of feminism and translation study. Introducing gender into translation for the first time, feminist translation develops rapidly and draws great attention from Chinese and overseas scholars. Having a style of its own, the theory aims at rewriting source texts to highlight feminist consciousness ignored by society.However, through thirty or forty years of researches, feminist translators are devoted to exploring the history and the development of feminist translation theory, or macroscopically introducing its translation methods but rarely studying it from its practical ways. Under this context, the thesis takes feminist translation as its theoretical framework to make a comparison of the two Chinese versions of Vanity Fair and then discusses how feminist translators highlight feminist consciousness and promote females' social status, and finally concludes the differences between men and women translators in translation process.As a masterpiece of Thackeray, Vanity Fair is a well-known English novel all over the world, which describes the ups and downs in the lives of two women in the male world, reflecting the fact that women always lie in the frontier position in the male world. Biased status and tragic fates of females arouse Thackeray's sympathy,which are mainly reflected in his linguistic features of describing women. Since 1990,there has been over 30 translated versions of Vanity Fair with totally different translation styles. As the person who paid great attention to Vanity Fair at the earliest time, Yang Bi set out to translate the novel for the first time in 1957, reproducing social elites of all forms and all kinds of social evils in the novel. Taking Yang's version which enjoys permanent fame and enduring popularity and the version of Rong Rude who is a member of Shanghai Research Institute of Culture and History as the research objects, the thesis throws light upon the main contents of feminist translation theory and reaches some relevant important conclusions through data collection, and then compares the different translation style of versions respectively conducted men translators and women translators by use of contrastive analysis, and next classifies the subjectivity of feminist translators by adopting qualitative methods,and finally illustrates the theory by way of case-study methods.Through application of the theory and comparative analysis of the corpus, thestudy has the following findings:(1) Feminist translation can be applied into concrete examples rather than confined to the theory itself.(2) The flavor of feminism in Yang's version is stronger, which is manifested in these three feminist translation methods: preface and footnoting, supplement and hijack.(3) In addition to the three translation methods: preface and footnoting, supplement and hijack, translators' subjectivities can achieve the goals of defending women as well.(4) Through the analysis of the versions translated by different genders, it has been found that linguistic features of men and women will also influence the translation activities.Since the publication of the Chinese translated versions of Vanity Fair, numerous studies have been conducted on them and abundant research achievements obtained.However, the perspective of feminist translation theory definitely provides a new angle for the researches of Vanity Fair. Besides that, comparative researches of two Chinese versions of Vanity Fair not only interpret the concrete application of feminist translation, but also broaden its practical way.