A Comparative Study Of Gladys Yang's And Jeffrey C.Kinkley's English Versions Of Biancheng From The Perspective Of Cultural Translation Theory

Biancheng,a representative of Shen Congwen,enjoys a reputation in Chinese literary history.It sets in a border town in western Hunan—Chadong in the 1930 s,which describes the specific folk customs in western Hunan with simple and elegant language.As a representative of Chinese rural novels,Biancheng is abundant in Chinese cultural information,especially culture information specific to western Hunan.Since its publishment over 80 years ago,there have been four English versions,the former two of which are seldom referred to now,the latest two: Gladys Yang's(1981)and Jeffrey C.Kinkley's(2009)are still classic now.There have been sufficient researches on the original text of Biancheng,but not enough researches on its English versions,and few from the perspective of culture.Therefore,this research studies Yang's and Kinkley's versions on the basis of Susan Bassnett's cultural translation theory.Cultural translation theory emphasizes that translation should take culture,instead of text,as the basic unit;translation is a communicative activity,instead of merely a process of decoding and recoding.Susan Bassnett's putting forward of cultural translation theory stands out as a millstone in the history of translation and translation studies.Based on cultural translation theory,this thesis compared the two English versions from Nida's classification of culture,that is,ecological culture,material culture,social culture,religious culture and linguistic culture.It is mainly discussed from the following two aspects:(1)What are the differences in the two translators' translation strategies in translating the cultural information of the original text? And why?(2)From the perspective of cultural translation,which version is more influenced by culturalmanipulation,and which version can better convey the cultural information in the original text?Through the analysis of the two versions from ecological culture,material culture,social culture,religious culture and linguistic culture,which is classified by Nida,the findings are as follows: both the two translators adopted foreignization and domestication in translating,but Yang tended to choose domestication as the main strategy while Kinkley mainly adopted foreignization or a combination of foreignization and domestication.The difference is due to their different cultural identities and the different translation times.From cultural translation theory,Kinkley's version is more affected by cultural manipulation,especially in translating ecological,material,social and religious culture related words and expressions,meanwhile,it has achieved a better cultural equivalence in dealing with these four cultures in the process of cultural construction.While in translating linguistic culture related words,Yang's version can create a similar cultural image in the target language as the original text.