A Research In Eileen Chang's Foreignization Strategy In The Golden Cangue

Eileen Chang was a legendary writer in the 20th century of Chinese literature.She made the female literature image with strong tragedy stories in most of her novels and named her collection of short stories as Romance,and her life itself was a desolation pathos and wonderful female Romance.Chang was one of the rare bilingual writers being skillful of using two languages to write and translate in the 20th century literary history.As a writer Eileen Chang was famous and won high praises among the art scholars and multinational readers.The Golden Cangue is one of the most important representatives of Eileen Chang,and gets a lot of praise from critics.(Here the author has to clarify that the English name of?????used in this thesis is The Golden Cangue unless the author is emphasizing the difference of the Chinese version and English version when she uses Jinsuo Ji to represent the Chinese version and The Golden Cangue the English version,especially in Chapter 3.)Mr.Fu Lei(2005)commended it as“the most beautiful literary harvest in China's literature history”.Professor C.T.Hsia regarded it as“the greatest novelette in the history of Chinese literature”(Hsia,1971:137).But as a translator,Chang's translation was still a fresh topic in the domestic translation field.Previous studies on Eileen Chang were largely confined to literary writing and ignored her contribution in translation.In this paper,the author selected Eileen Chang's self-translation of The Golden Cangue as a case study to analysis her translation strategies and to prove that Chang's main translation policy is applying foreignization mainly in the Chinese-English translation to transmit the original Chinese culture.The two terms of foreignization and domestication are used to describe two translation strategies and created by the American translation theorist Lawrence Venuti. Sun Zhili, a famous translator and theorist in China, also has some academic findings related to these two strategies. They both think that foreignization is usually used deliberately to break the norms of the target-language culture and to retain the original exotic look. The translators who apply foreignization generally have distinct attitude. In order to fully show the emotional tone of the original text, and give the target readers the same feeling as the original readers, Eileen Chang applied the translation strategy of “foreignization first, domestication second” to her self-translation whether in linguistic aspect or in cultural aspect to save Chinese language features and cultural characteristics as much as possible. On the one hand, Eileen Chang applied domestication strategy in the whole translated text by using fluent local English expression to make sure that the target readers could obtain the same information as the original readers. On the other hand, she used foreignization strategy to keep a large number of Chinese cultural factors and maintain the charm of Chinese cultural works. The purpose is to make the target readers understand Chinese language characteristics, culture connotations and Chang's writing style by reading the translated text, and to spread Chinese culture to foreign countries through the language conversion process in translation activities.This paper is divided into five chapters.The first chapter introduces the researches in Eileen Chang and her translation, especially her self-translation. The second chapter describes the relevant theories of this article, that is, foreignization and domestication translation strategies. The third chapter outlines the life experience and contribution of Eileen Chang, the influence of the foreignization strategy she applied in The Golden Cangue, and the brief introduction of the Chinese version Jinsuo Ji. The fourth chapter is the most important part of this paper and focuses on the application of Eileen Chang's foreignization in The Golden Cangue. The fifth chapter is the relation between foreignization and cultural transmission. At the same time, it tells something about the reason, purpose and significance of Eileen Chang's foreignization strategy.