| How to construct and disseminate right images of a country,a nation or an ethnic group has recently become an essential question and raised a lot of image studies.These studies are usually relevant to translating activities,the main measure to realize crosscultural communications.Where the image studies and translation studies connect leads to a tendency to introduce imagology,a discipline specially studying the images of the other,into translation studies.Theories of imagology believe that the descriptions of foreign countries in literature are of social and historical significance.The research objective of the thesis is to study the variations on the hetero-images,the Japanese army,that occur in three different Chinese translations of The Joy Luck Club translated in different historical periods and is to study the underlying reasons.Also,the thesis looks into the differences between the variations which has occurred in different periods of time.The thesis is mainly a descriptive and comparative study.The documentary method and the comparative method are mainly applied to answer the research questions.The framework of the thesis is as following: first,the images in the source text and the target texts are deconstructed and concluded according to Pageaux's framework on deconstructing an image at the lexical level,on the context structure and the narrative structure.Then a comparative study is performed to find out the variations on the images after translating activities,using the framework with a reference to the maxims of cooperation to see the differences between the ST and the TTs and conclude how they vary the image and what are the variations.Then the reasons are explained with the insight into three aspects: influences of the social and historical circumstances,the social collective imagination,and the translators' own experience.The study has found that first,all of the three translations violate the maxims of quantity,which makes the image of the Japanese army explicit at the literal level.This violation does not vary the whole image.The occurrence of the explicitation is mainly because of the differences between the communicating habits of the two languages and the translators' intension to realize a better coherence and reading experience for the readers.Second,the translations in 1992 and 2006 by Cheng violates the maxims of quality,quantity and manner at the lexical level,on the interrelationship between the characters and the plot,which strengthen the savagely brutal image and the hateful image of the Japanese.The translation in 2006 actually strengthens the image harder than the one in 1992.What's more,the translation in 2006 varies the originally presupposed image of the Japanese into a stereotype on the Japanese in China by violating the maxims of quality.As for the translating process,it can be concluded that with the violations to the maxims of quality,usually new information and connotations are given to the image while violations to the quantity and the manner usually influence the degree or the effect of the image.The reasons of the variations are explained with the three factors.And the thesis found that,it is because Cheng's family background and her living environment make her easier to form a stereotype of the Japanese.In contrast,her translation in 2006 is probably influenced by the social circumstances at that time and also as a more free translation is adopted,more variations occur.Li's does not vary the original image probably because he and his translation are both in a time when people have more open and critical sight about the Japanese army.Also,his adoption of the faithful translation may be influenced by the appeal of faithful translation and the consciousness of copywrite recently.With the development of time and a younger society as well as the deeper communications between the countries,the social collective imagination on the Japanese army is likely to be more far away from the stereotypes. |
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