A Study On Textless Back Translation Of Fifth Chinese Daughter From Perspective Of Acculturation

As“the mother of Chinese American literature”(according to Maxine Hong Kingston)and the first widely recognized Chinese-American writer in the white American society,Jade Snow Wong was known as the author of two biographical novels--Fifth Chinese Daughter and No Chinese Stranger.Her first autobiographical novel Fifth Chinese Daughter gained millions of readers and was selected in the junior and senior high school textbooks in America,which is a huge recognition for American Chinese writers in the 1940s.In 1951,the State Department of the United States funded the project of translating Fifth Chinese Daughter into various languages,including Chinese,Japanese,Bengali,Thai,Burmese,etc.In mainland China,Fifth Chinese Daughter was translated by Zhang Longhai into Hua Nv A Wu(《华女阿五》),which was collected in Book Series on Chinese American Literature published in 2004.In spite of her high reputation in the international community at large,Jade Snow Wong and her works have gained little and insufficient attention at home.To be specific,no previous studies on the novel’s Chinese translation have yet been made.This thesis,therefore,aims to make a comparative study between source text and target text of Fifth Chinese Daughter from the perspective of acculturation theory.Textless back translation here refers to the kind of back translation in which the translator retranslates China-themed works written in English language back into Chinese language.In recent years,it has begun to draw a closer attention from the academic circles and arouse heated discussions among scholars and experts.This paper holds that a large number of Chinese culture-loaded elements are in both the source text and the target text,which are typical of China-themed works written in English and their textless back translations.For this reason,China-themed works written in English boast a distinctly richer diction than other literary works written in English.It is obvious that the translator,in translating the text,regards the source text as the very standard and considers it as his duty to restore the Chinese culture-loaded elements to their very equivalents in the Chinese language as much as he can.In restoring these elements,the translator usually removes those modifiers and explanations that were originally added to make Chinese culture-loaded elements clearer to English readers who are relatively unfamiliar with the traditional Chinese culture,thereby simplifying the language.Besides,textless back translators are inclined to simplify their diction also for the sake of readability as conventional translators do.Through comparing the target text of Fifth Chinese Daughter with other Chinese target texts,the consistency in data may well justify the argument that textless back translation is,by nature,a kind translation.In terms of translation strategies,assimilation and integration are the mainstream regarding the textless back translation of Fifth Chinese Daughter.And the employment of assimilation strategy – a significant indicator of works for textless back translation – prevails and the strategy can be further divided into “accurate assimilation” and “imprecise assimilation” according to the degree of restoration.In this regard,the translation of its kind is the back translation of culture as well.