A Study Of Yang Renjing's Translation Of The Color Purple Based On Antoine Berman's Translation Criticism Theory

The Color Purple,an epistolary novel of Walker who is an American black woman writer,is a classic work of Western feminist literature.Up to now,four domestic translators have translated it into Chinese.As the only male translator,Yang Renjing?s translation has attracted much attention.Most of the relevant studies,taking the controversial sentences as examples,compare it with other translated versions to evaluate his female consciousness and translation methods,which lacks a comprehensive investigation on the translation,the translator,the cultural and historical factors and so forth.Antoine Berman,a French translator,translation theorist and philosopher,puts forward a productive idea in his Toward a Translation Criticism: John Donne.He points out that an analysis of the translation is indeed a key link in translation criticism,but the preparation before that is equally important.First of all,it is necessary for critics to complete the readings of the translation and the original independently,to locate their stylistic features and representative textual zones and to prepare for the subsequent comparative analysis.Then,it?s important to search for the translator from three aspects of translation position,translation project and translation horizon.Translation position refers to a compromise between the ways of recognizing translation by individual and society;Translation project affects the modes of translation;translation horizon is a series of linguistic,literary,cultural and historical parameters that determine the feeling,behavior and thinking of the translator.Having completed the preliminary readings,we come to the well-founded analysis of translation at last.On the basis of existing researches on Berman?s translation criticism theory,this paper attempts to analyze Yang Renjing?s translation of Alice Walker?s The Color Purple in order to form a more comprehensive and systematic understanding of Yang?s translation.The findings are as follows: firstly,a complete translation criticism should not only focus on text analysis,but also on the translator and cultural history behind the text.Secondly,in The Color Purple,the heroine Celie and her sister Nettie are different in their language styles.This contrastive language strategy matters in reflecting the national consciousness of black people.In order to reproduce the original?s linguistic charm and social theme,Yang not only mainly adopts the literal translation method but also makes the most of sentence patterns and punctuations in Chinese.Thirdly,the omission of body and sexual descriptions in Yang's version is because of the requirements of the mainstream ideology and discourse not because of the absence of his female consciousness.Fourthly,by analyzing Yang?s translation of four main characters? idiolects,this thesis,taking the idiolects of the four representative characters in the novel as examples,concludes that Yang's version,on the whole,not only retains the linguistic charm of the original but also reproduces the original?s feminism theme.