A Critique Of The Translation Of Seven Stories In The Inaugural Issue Of Chinese Arts & Letters

Chinese literature magazines in English have become an important channel to introduce translated Chinese literary works to the outside world,thus attracting attention of the academia.But existing research on such magazines are mostly conducted from the perspectives of communication theory and medio-translatology,with the focus on macro-level factors such as their contributions to literary and cultural communication,publication,operation mode,translation policies,and so on.Few have carefully examined the translation quality of such magazines.The thesis holds the view that among the many factors influencing the outcome of China's efforts to introduce its literature,the quality of the translations is the most fundamental one,and therefore it is quite necessary to criticize the quality of the translated texts themselves.Therefore,the thesis choses the inaugural issue of Chinese Arts & Literature as its research subject and aims to examine the translation quality of the fictional discourses published in it.By combining Benedetto Croce's aesthetic ideas and some key concepts and methods from literary stylistics,the thesis constructs a theoretical framework for text-based contrastive analysis.First,inspired by Robert de Beaugrande's distinction between the general level and the more specific level in discussing poetry translation,the thesis divides a fictional discourse into two levels: the general level(information)and the literary level(literariness).Next,the information level of a fictional discourse is further divided,based on the aesthetic ideas proposed by Croce,into two aspects,i.e.content and form,and investigation is conducted as to whether or not the translations have conveyed faithfully the original impressions(content),and whether or not the translations are beautiful expressions(form).Then,since literariness is best embodied in style,theoretical concepts and methods from literary stylistics are adopted in the analysis of the translations as to whether or not the stylistic features of the original texts have been retained.Finally,the research summarizes and classifies the translation problems into different categories and explores their possible causes and solutions.After a detailed case study,the thesis comes to the conclusion that the translation quality of the magazine is rather unsatisfactory with all the various kinds of problems,which fall into three general categories: infidelity in content,ugliness in form,and infidelity in style.In order to solve these problems and improve the overall quality of the magazine,this study suggests that editors as well as translators should accord more importance to translation quality control and make efforts in the following four aspects: translation principles,translation attitudes,linguistic proficiency,and literary competence.