A Critical Commentary On Selected E-C Translation Of Chapter 5 Of World And Town

This critical commentary focuses on the approaches the translator adopts in the translation of Chapter 5 of World and Town in an attempt to discuss how to maintain the style of the source text in translation.World and Town,from which chapter 5 is selected as the source text,is a novel written by Gish Jen,a second-generation Chinese American woman writer.This novel tells the story of the main protagonist Hattie Kong,a 68-year-old Chinese American woman who is going through a long journey towards self-transformation from rebellion to rebirth against the background of the 21st century America amidst globalization,immigration and fundamentalism.The translated chapter depicts how she struggles through self-reconstruction,trying to find her sense of belonging and becoming.It describes how she tries to find her Chinese roots when she goes to her parents’ graves with a bone picker to excavate the remains of her parents and reburies them in Qufu,China.In doing so,she crosses the divide between the living and the dead,questioning the meaning of lives and death to her.She finally reaches out to her Cambodian neighbors and finds a place of her own as she helps them build their life in America.This chapter contains subtle expressions of Hattie’s mental activities that show her inner world,making it difficult for the translator to maintain the original style in translation.By enumerating and analyzing typical examples in the translation,this critical commentary compares approaches of domestication and foreignization and analyzes three strategies adopted by the translator-semantic faithfulness,syntactical consistency and stylistic equivalence.It suggests that foreignization is more conducive in maintaining the original style of the source text.