The Effect Of Translator's Subjectivity On The Shaping Of Female Images In Novels

In Luotuo Xiangzi,Lao She portrays a full and unreplaceable image of Chinese women with their appellations,appearances,body parts,personalized language and movements.Therefore,the transmission of characters has become an important part of the translation of the novel.Generally speaking,the translator should,on the basis of the source text,accurately convey these characters in the novel into the targeted text.It's inevitable that the play of the translator's subjectivity will affect the shaping of characters in the translation of the novel.For these reasons,this dissertation takes the Chinese version of Luotuo Xiangzi as a blueprint and four English versions published in the English-speaking world as examples.Lao She's Luotuo Xiangzi,which is a male literary work,has been translated for four times in English by translators at home and abroad.It fully highlights the importance of Luotuo Xiangzi and the need for further research on the four English versions of this novel.This dissertation adopts the descriptive research method,the comparative literature research method and the case study method.This dissertation focuses on the translation of five aspects of female images,namely,address terms,characters,appearances,vocabularies related to privacy,the rewriting of female images.Through the analysis of the relationship between the novel and English versions of Luotuo Xiangzi,it mainly analyzes how female images are shaped by four translators because of the play of the translator's subjectivity.The dissertation attempts to actively seek a reasonable translation model for words and expressions concerning women images against the backdrop of “Chinese literature going-out”,and to convey to readers the true images of Chinese women.The research drew the conclusion that owing to the play of the translator's subjectivity,different translators could choose different translation strategies to translate the same expressions in the novel.Meanwhile,these translation strategies are closely related to how female images are mapped onto the target cultures.In other words,female images in the novel are distorted or rewritten in the English versions to some extent.Therefore,translation doesn't mean the simple,faithful translation at the semantic or lexical level.That is to say,as to the translation of words and expressions concerning the female images,the actual performance of the translator's subjectivity is related to the reshaping of female images in the translations.Under the guidance of the translator's subjectivity,this dissertation analyzed the translation of expressions on the shaping of the female images in Luotuo Xiangzi to make the literary flavor,which is tasted by native language speakers,savored by the English-speaking readers.And it helps the source language culture establish its own local register and seek a proper channel to express the author's intention in the target language,thus promoting equal exchanges between Chinese and western cultures.