Foreignization In Eileen Chang's Version Of The Old Man And The Sea

As a writer,Eileen Chang has always been one of the focuses of academic research.As a translator,she has become a hot topic in translation studies in recent years.But the depth and breadth of the research still need to be strengthened.The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway's masterpiece.He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 for this work.She finished the translation of this book during her employment with the United States Information Agency in Hong Kong in 1952.Her translation was the first Chinese version of this work in China,but the translation failed to catch the attention of domestic reading public for quite a long time.Therefore,this thesis selects Eileen Chang's version of The Old Man and the Sea as the research objective and compares it with Wu Lao's version.The author analyzes the influence of English on written Chinese,concerning the characteristics and representation of foreignizing translation at lexical,syntactical and cultural levels from the perspective of the foreignizing translation theory.The reason why she chooses the foreignization strategy and what methods she chooses to realize foreignization are also analyzed.The author hopes that the thesis can provide reference for the translation of other foreign literary works in the context of globalization.Two research methods are mainly applied in this thesis,namely comparison and exemplification.The purpose of comparison is not to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the two translations,but to show the foreignizing features of Eileen Chang's translation more clearly.Exemplification is adopted to illustrate the unique foreignizing strategy in Eileen Chang's translation.Through a research on this topic,the thesis arrives at the following conclusions:1.Eileen Chang adopts foreignization as the main strategy of translation and retains the grammatical features and heterogeneous culture with English characteristics.At the lexical level,most words are translated literally without any adjustment.At the syntactical level,the structure and the order of sentence elements in the source text are reserved to cover up the differences between English and Chinese.She organizes the Chinese language according to the sentence structure of English.Chinese syntax emphasizes parataxis,but the Chinese language of hypotaxis makes the grammatical structure more flexible.The foreignized sentence structure also creates a strange feeling,which may sometimes give the readers full aesthetic experience.At the cultural level,she reserves the unique religious culture and social culture of the English-speaking countries,not only giving the reader novel cognition and experience but also adding foreign colors and fun of reading.Proportion-wise,Eileen Chang adopts foreignization to translate cultural elements mostly.But she sometimes also adopts domestication to reduce the difficulty of reading and shorten the distance between the reader and the author.2.There are three main reasons why Eileen Chang adopts foreignization.The first one is the patronage.Eileen Chang's translation of The Old Man and the Sea is sponsored by the United States Information Agency.Her selection of text,strategy of translation and intended effect of translation must reflect the will of the United States Information Agency.The second one is the poetics.During the May Fourth Movement,some influential intellectuals tried to absorb and imitate the West in both writing and translation.Europeanization of Chinese became a distinctive social phenomenon.She herself is also influenced by works of writers who experienced the May Fourth Movement.And consciously or unconsciously,she often shows signs of Europeanization which go against with conventions of Chinese grammar in her translation.The translation of The Old and the Sea is no exception.The third one is the ideology.Eileen Chang's version of The Old Man and the Sea was translated in Hong Kong and published by Hong Kong Zhong Yi Publishing House in 1952.At that time,Hong Kong implemented capitalism and it was the frontier where the UK.and the US.resisted the Communist Party.The United States Information Agency set up an administrative office in Hong Kong to implement diplomatic and cultural policies of the US government's global strategic layout.In addition,Eileen Chang was born into a family of declining bureaucracy and had received Western education all along.Therefore,her personal values matched the strategy of the United States Information Agency and the mainstream ideology of the then Hong Kong society to a large extent.3.Although Eileen Chang adopts domestication once in a while,she adopts the foreignization as the main strategy overwhelmingly throughout her translation.Readers may get a feel of “symptomatic reading” when they read it.Even so,Eileen Chang's version manages to reproduce the original heterogeneous features adequately.Although the language is a little strange but it does not affect its acceptability.In a nutshell,the thesis analyzes the foreignization translation appearing in Eileen Chang's version with a large number of exemplifications and comparisons.And it also summarizes strategy of translation and the potential reasons for adopting this strategy so that readers can move closer to the original work.The author hopes that this thesis can contribute its bit to the domestic research on Eileen Chang's translation.