On The Reconstruction Of Female Images In The English Translation Of The Bathing Women From The Perspective Of Imagology

Tie Ning’s novel The Bathing Women,a delicate recount of the lives of contemporary Chinese women with their morality and emotions,became a favorite in the literary market when it first appeared in 2000 and was selected into “PRC Writer’s Library” by the Writer’s Press in 2009.In 2012,Scribner Press and Thorndike Press published the English version of The Bathing Women,translated by Zhang Hongling and Jason Sommer,which attracted widespread attention overseas and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in the same year.On the one hand,this shows the unique literary value and social significance of The Bathing Women itself,and on the other hand,it also shows the significance of the English translation of The Bathing Women as an example of a successful translation of contemporary Chinese women’s literature,which can bring inspiration for further “going abroad” of Chinese contemporary literature.As a female Bildungsroman,The Bathing Women takes women as the subject of speech,experience,thinking and aesthetics,and through the narration of the female protagonist’s growing experience,it describes the life experience of the female protagonist from childhood to middle age,reflecting the process of changes in the female protagonist’s mind and psychology under the changes of the times.Therefore,the portrayal of female characters in the translation of The Bathing Women plays a pivotal role in the English readers’ understanding of the theme of the work.This thesis uses imagology from comparative literature as a theoretical framework to investigate the reconstruction of female images in the English translation of The Bathing Women.By comparing the source text with the target text,it is discovered that the images of the four main female characters(Zhang Wu,Yin Xiaofan,Tang Fei and Yin Xiaotiao)have been reconstructed in the English translation.Therefore,based on the research methods of imagology from comparative literature,the case study analysis in this thesis is divided into two parts: Intrinsic Analysis and Extrinsic Analysis.In the Intrinsic Analysis,this study attempts to find out what changes have occurred to the four main female characters by comparing the descriptions of the images on the lexical and syntactic levels in the original text with those in the translation.In the Extrinsic Analysis outside the text,this study attempts to analyze the reasons for the reconstruction of the female images in the English translation of The Bathing Women from three aspects: the social collective imagination of the West towards “Chinese women”,the waves of Western feminism and their influence on American society,and the translator as the subject of “image reconstruction”.The conclusion of this study is that under the reconstruction of translators Zhang Hongling and Jason Sommer,the four main female characters in the original text of The Bathing Women,namely,Wu,Fan,Fei,and Tiao,have all been rewritten to different degrees in the translation process.The female images except Tiao have all been villanized in different aspects,while the image of the female protagonist Tiao has been excessively glorified in the translation process,and Tiao’s image of seeking redemption from the original text has been rewritten to become the symbol of the ideal “awakened woman” from the perspective of Western feminism.The translator’s reconstruction of the female images is largely conditioned by the social collective imagination of Western society,while the Western social environment and feminist trends at the time of the publication of the translation also play a key role in this process.Equally important are the translation strategy adopted by the translator Zhang Hongling and her own view of translation,the depth of the translator’s understanding of the images and the theme of the original work,as well as the translator’s own view of literature and translation all have an impact on the reconstruction of female images in the English translation of The Bathing Women.By applying the theory of imaglogy from comparative literature,this thesis studies and explains the reasons for the reconstruction of the main female images in the English translation of The Bathing Women,which provides another research perspective for the English translation of contemporary Chinese literature,and also provides an idea for the future studies of image reconstruction in the translation process.This thesis hopes to be an important reference for the future translation studies on image reconstruction.