A Comparative Study On Two Chinese Translations Of Mansfield Park From A Feminist Perspective

The feminist thought in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park can be challenging to translators.Different translators may reproduce its feminist consciousness differently according to their understanding of the original and their translation strategies.From a feminist approach to translation studies,this thesis explores how Xiang Xingyao and Xi Yuqing handle the novel's feminist elements respectively.This study thus considers feminism in two aspects—feminist thought in Austen's original work and a feminist approach to translating this work—and examines how the translators' understandings of feminism are reflected in their treatments to the feminist contents of the novel.A comparative study of Xi's and Xiang's translations reveals almost contrastive trajectories that they take in translating the novel.While Xiang's seemingly faithful rending of Austen's language may have left its feminist significations latent,Xi's overtly interventive approach not only gives full light to the novel's feminist thought but even rewrites it from a 21 st century feminist perspective.The translators' different understandings are revealed in their translation strategies,strategies that reflect the translators' conceptions of faithfulness and are best seen in their handlings of the novel in three aspects,that is,female identity,social and familial positions of men and women,and cultural images of men and women.Thus,through a comparative examination of the two translations from these aspects,this study finds that while Xiang's translation is faithful to the novel at the language level but fails to reach its feminist consciousness to some degree,Xi's does not render the text word by word,but is faithful to the feminist cause that feminist translation theory promotes and that Austen may have anticipated.As a result,some of Austen's feminist sense is missing in Xiang's translation.By contrast,Xi's translation highlights Austen's feminist thought and pushes it to a higher level by producing a Chinese translation that allows the novel's female figures to enjoy a higher psychological position and brighter images than they may have in the English version.Xi's translation seems to be as faithful as Xiang's in terms of language.However,the former is faithful in a different sense,as Xi's translation as feminist rewriting is more aligned with the notion of fidelity advocated by feminist translation theory.