| FOUR GENERATIONS UNDER ONE ROOF is one of Lao She’s major novels set in the period of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression.The third part of this serial,Famine,was not published in complete version(only 20 out of 36 chapters were published in a literary magazine)before the manuscript got lost.Fortunately,in 2014,the complete manuscript of the English translation of the serial by Ida Pruitt was discovered in the USA and later on the 16 missing chapters were translated back into Chinese by Zhao Wu-ping and got published in 2017.A year later,People’s Literature Publishing House published another version translated by Bi Bing-bin.These two translated versions proved to be an important event to break the boundary of different translation disciplines.At present,researches on Zhao’s and Bi’s translations are very scarce.Based on the theory of Medio-translatology,this paper finds out the influence of the reception environment,the classical poetics of FOUR GENERATIONS UNDER ONE ROOF and the translator’s subjectivity on their translation strategies,and studies the dissemination,acceptance and evolution of “back translation” in the reception environment.As a masterpiece of classic literature,FOUR GENERATIONS UNDER ONE ROOF has won a large number of readers and researchers in China,but its reception environment,translation initiator and classic poetics characterized by language,style and ideological connotation all limit the choice of translation strategies.However,the current inclusive cultural environment has encouraged the translators to play out their creativity.Therefore,the two translators’ “back translation” of the last 16 chapters of Famine shows the dual characteristics of loyalty and betrayal.As an individual expert on Lao She,Zhao Wu-ping was able to refine Lao She’s concise,clear,vivid and rhythmic language style,but in his translation,he failed to adhere to this understanding.Instead,he followed the style of both Ida Pruitt and Lao She as translators of this novel.On the basis of literal translation,he embellished the translation by establishing "Lao She’s Vocabulary Pool".Although his translation can partially match some of the words used by Lao She in the 1940 s,it has strong “translationese” and lack of accuracy in the flow of expression.In contrast,Bi Bing-bin,as a professional translator,took a rational view on the English translation manuscript,and showed more autonomy in his translation.On the basis of faithfulness,he retained the characteristics of Lao She’s Beijing accent,and successfully recreated a cadence of speech of Beijing dialect similar to the original Lao She style based on his own knowledge of rhetorics of everyday oral speech of the Beijing dialet.For the restoration of the literary elements of the novel,both Zhao Wu-ping and Bi Bing-bin have their advantages and disadvantages.Taking Lao She’s vocabulary as a tool,Zhao Wu-ping has an irreplaceable advantage in the translation of Lao She’s common words and address forms.However,due to his excessive emphasis on word substitution and neglect of the context of the novel,some cultural words processed with foreignization failed to return to the native culture.While Bi Bing-bin’s translation,according to the English translation manuscript,strengthened the sense of hatred on the part of the people of Peiping against the Japanese invaders,and restored the Chinese cultural character of distinguishing good from evil adhering to the context of novel by means of minor addition,deletion and transformation.However,because the translator’s subjectivity is too prominent,the translation fails to be consistent with the previous text in terms of address forms,modal particles and so on.To view the translation of the 16 missing chapters of Famine from the cultural perspective,it is necessary to break out of the scope of the traditional literary translation research,and analyze the past and present status of the translation from a cross-cultural perspective to discern the influence of culture on the generation,dissemination and acceptance of the translation,so as to evaluate the value of the translation more objectively and provide an effective reference for the emergence of new versions in the future. |
