Translation Within A Transcultural Cooperation Network

With The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin and Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang successively winning the Hugo Award,Chinese science fiction has become famous overseas and gained more and more international attention and recognition in recent years.With concerted efforts made by all parties at home and abroad,many excellent Chinese science fiction works keep going abroad and are favored by foreign readers.Noticeably,the “English Translation Project of Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction”(hereinafter referred to as “English Translation Project” for short)jointly launched by Storycom,a Chinese professional story commercialization agency,and Clarkesworld,a renowned American science fiction and fantasy magazine,is a typical case of Chinese science fiction going abroad.As the first and largest project of the translation of Chinese science fiction into the English-speaking world,it is of great research value.As a social practice,translation is closely related to society.In each stage of a translation activity,multiple actors are involved to give shape to the final translation product in a collaborative way.Actor-network theory(ANT),which is developed especially by the French sociologist Bruno Latour,focuses on the relationship between various actors(including human actors and non-human actors)in the process of social practice.The theory holds that the nature of social practice should be understood by tracing a dynamic network formed by multiple interacting actors.From the perspective of this sociological theory,the study of translation activity under its social context can provide a new direction to observe the social production process of translation.Drawing on Latour's actor-network theory,this thesis explores the whole social production process of this “English Translation Project” and further analyzes the reasons for its success.Firstly,with the help of the Internet,the author gathers necessary information about this project by tracing the core actors and conducting interviews with some actors involved.In this way,the author reconstructs the transcultural cooperation network of the whole translation project at the macro level.Then,this thesis takes the nine Chinese science fiction stories in Touchable Unreality,a Chinese-English bilingual anthology published as a phased result under this project,as the materials for textual analysis.After a careful comparison of the source texts and target texts,the author analyzes the strategies reflected in the translations from a micro level.Finally,this thesis summarizes the purposes and characteristics of these translation strategies adopted and further reveals the factors that contribute to the successful export of Chinese science fiction under this translation project.It is found that various actors from both the source culture and the target culture work together to promote the initiation and smooth operation of the project.To put it more specifically,in different stages of this translation project,all the actors enrolled interact with each other to form the transcultural cooperation network,within which the final translation products are produced.In addition,the further textual analysis shows that domesticated strategies are adopted by the translators to deal with the source texts.For example,the translators make obvious alterations to the original text structure at the macro level by means of the division of long paragraphs and sentences,the rearrangement of sentence order and the deletion and addition of large parts of information;and at the same time,exert minor modifications to the original content by means of supplementary explanation,simplification,paraphrase and replacement.All of these adjustments made aim to produce translations in a narrative way that is more familiar to the target reader,thus enhancing the readability and acceptability of the translations.To conclude,the effectiveness of this translation project is realized within the transcultural cooperation network.The sound cooperation mechanism established between multiple actors and the target-culture oriented translation strategies play essential roles to the successful export of the final translation products.