An Intertextual Analysis Of The Two Translated Chinese Versions Of Pride And Prejudice

The term “intertextuality”,put forward by Julia Kristeva in 1966,refers to the shaping of a text's meaning by another text through absorption and adaptation.Translation is an intertextual activity,one that involves the absorption,deletion,alteration and creation of texts by the translator through interaction with the author and the reader.As an intertextual activity,translation incorporates three levels of intertextual relations: the intertextuality between the source text and the source language;between the source text and the target text;between the target text and the target language.The quality of translation is determined by whether the translator recognizes,understands and transfers the intertextual relations successfully.It is,therefore,the translator's responsibility to recognize the intertextual signs in the source text,to understand the author's intentions behind them and to transfer them in the target text based on their knowledge of the target language.This thesis analyzes the intertextual relations in Pride and Prejudice and its two Chinese translated versions and examined whether the two versions transfer the intertextuality between the source text and its language and culture system in a precise manner.The author starts from the three levels of intertextuality in the three texts: intertextuality between Pride and Prejudice and its own language system;intertextuality between Pride and Prejudice and the translated versions,which is further divided into active and passive intertextuality;and intertextuality between the translated versions of Wang's and Sun's.It is found that Sun recognizes more intertextual relations between Pride and Prejudice and the source language than Wang and tends to transfers them by adding more annotations.He manages to maintain the cohesion of the original with the novel by observing the intertextual signals from within the novel.He modified Wang's translation to adapt to the synchronic changes in Chinese language system.From this point of view,Sun's retranslation of the novel is an improvement of Wang's previous translation.