A Study Of Images Of China In Patrick Hanan’s English Translation Of The Sea Of Regret From The Perspective Of Translation Ethics

In recent years,with the development of the Chinese economy and cultural communication,more and more foreigners are eager to know about China.There is no doubt that translation is one of the significant links and ways to connect different languages and cultures,which contributes to the construction of images of China in a specific era.During this process,the Sinologists play important roles to a certain degree.However,in the process of translation,it is difficult for translators to represent the original work completely.Behind this,the translator’s choices of translation ethics must be reflected.Translation ethics is a hot topic in translation studies in recent years.Among them,the Finnish scholar Andrew Chesterman puts forward the five models of translation ethics,namely,(1)ethics of representation;(2)ethics of service;(3)ethics of communication;(4)norm-based ethics;(5)ethics of commitment.The five models of translation ethics are used to analyze the translator’s choices of translation ethics,which are more objective and comprehensive.The Sea of Regret is a romance novel written by Wu Jianren,a novelist in Qing Dynasty.This work combines the writing skills of Western novels and creates a precedent for Chinese novels to pay attention to the psychological description of characters.The novel contains Chinese traditional marriage culture,filial piety culture,traditional characters,and other images.It is the translator’s responsibility to represent the alien cultures objectively and fairly and construct the Chinese cultural images in the target language.Taking Patrick Hanan’s English translation of Wu Jianren’s The Sea of Regret as the research object,this thesis explores the construction of China’s images from Western perspective based on Chesterman’s five models of translation ethics.This study finds that as a Sinologist proficient in Chinese and Western cultures,Hanan,respecting for the original work and maintaining Western values,constructs images of China that meet the needs of readers in the target language world through different translation strategies.From the perspective of ethics of representation,the translator adopts the strategy of foreignization to represent the writing style of the original work,convey the delicate psychological activities of the protagonist Dihua in the translation,and to construct the female image of virtue.From the perspective of ethics of service,the translator translates scenes of companions helping each other by adopting the strategy of amplification,deliberately blurring the identity of the characters in the novel,and intentionally strengthening the tone and action of the characters in the novel,so as to achieve a specific translation effect.In this way,the translator can enable the target language readers to better perceive the mutual aid and fraternity of Chinese people,and construct friendly image of mutual help.From the perspective of ethics of communication,the translator deals with Chinese traditional marriage customs by adopting the strategies of free translation and sentence structure transformation,so as to realize the communication between foreign culture and domestic culture,and construct the marriage image of the talents and the beauties.From the perspective of norm-based ethics,the translator describes the filial piety of the characters in the novel by adopting the strategies of foreignization and sentence structure transformation,so as to meet the target language readers’ expectations on traditional Chinese filial piety culture and construct the traditional Chinese image of filial piety.From the perspective of ethics of commitment,Hanan follows the translator’s professional ethics,coordinates the relationship among various images,spreads the spiritual connotation of Chinese traditional cultures to English world,and constructs comprehensive images of the cardinal virtues.From the perspective of translation ethics,this thesis studies Hanan’s English Translation of The Sea of Regret,focusing on constructing Chinese images of “the Other” and enabling the target language readers to understand China and Chinese traditional cultures,so as to provide reference and consideration for the construction of China’s images and the translation of Chinese literature in the new era.