On C-E Translation Of Liu Cixin's Science Fiction

The Chinese Science fiction is generally known to be making its start at a time when the genre in English speaking countries has already reached its maturity.While the English translation of science fiction helped Chinese readers understand science fiction since the Qing Dynasty,a reciprocal process occurs where the contemporary C-E translation helps foreign readers to see Chinese science fiction afresh:Jean Verne's and Stevens' science fictional works have become an integral part of translated literature in China and Liu Cixin's novels are widely known in the West.Viewed from Nida's Reader's Response theory,then,the reader's feedback is more essential to the study of the translation of science fiction.As one of the core concepts in Nida's dynamic equivalence translation theory,the Reader response translation theory requires the translator to consider whether the target language readers can understand relevant information in the way as source language reader reads the original text,achieving thereby a high degree of'dynamic effect'.Based on an extensive literature review and analysis that includes the status quo of Chinese science fictional novels and the key concepts in reader response theory proposed by Nida,this thesis first focuses on a comparative analysis of the major precepts in reader response theory with those of feminist translation theory and literary studies(the implied readers and the readers' horizons of expectation)in order to find out convergences in these theoretical trends that may shed lights on the discussion of the present thesis.Accordingly,the thesis illustrates,with extensive examples from the English versions of Three Body Problem(translated by Liu Yukun)and The Dark Forest(translated by Joel Martinson),how different translation strategies were adopted to deal with the problems of sexuality,culture-loaded words,and scientific terms.It is found that:1)in his translation of Three Body Problem,Liu relies largely on free translation,with literal translation,incremental translation,and annotation as auxiliary strategies.By contrast,Martinson's text,while also favoring free translation,leans much more to incremental translation,and in parts that concerns cultural elements,adopts much more literal translation,its end being,presumably,to use the familiar language of the reader to produce on the readers of the culture of the target language the same effect as the readers of the original language.2)with regard to the three different types of translation,translators are flexible in adopting a variety of translation methods:literal translation,for instance,is adopted mostly to retain the Chinese culture-loaded words;and 3)judging from the mistranslation and inappropriate translation identified in both texts,it can be argued that even in science fiction genre,culture should be taken as a unit of translation so as to accurately translate the cultural connotation of the original text.