PANEL 7
LITERARY TRANSLATION II
Chair: Wenqian Zhang, University of Leeds
English-speaking Readers’ Reception to Chinese Martial Arts Fictions: A Case Study on Legends of the Condor Heroes
Xiaodan Shan (University of Leeds, UK)
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A Hero Born, the first volume of Legends of the Condor Heroes, was published in 2018, which is the English translation of Shediao Yingxiong Zhuan, an important work of one of the most well-known Chinese martial arts novelists, Jin Yong. However, although his fifteen novels have been translated into most Asian languages, only four of them have been officially translated into English since the 1990s, including the recent published one. With limited objects of study, works on the English translations of Jin Yong’s works are limited as well – the appearance of the first in-depth English-language study of Jin Yong and his works was in 2006 (Hamm, 2006) and most works focused more on translators (Mok, 2001; 2002) than on readers, who should be given more attention to in studies related to readers reception (Chan, 2010). Therefore, this paper will focus on English-speaking readers’ reception to Legends of the Condor Heroes and explore what factors can influence readers’ reception.This paper will first present findings of how readers respond to this translated version by means of sending questionnaires, conducting interviews and collecting book reviews. Then a discussion of the findings will be made to analyse the possible factors that can influence readers’ reception, with examples from the source and target texts.
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Comparative Study of the English Translations of the Moon Imagery in Su Shi’s Poetry
Jinan Wei (Changzhou Institute of Technology, China)
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Su Shi was a very influential Chinese poet in Chinese literary history. His poetry is rich in the moon imagery that is characterized by the interactiveness with the poet. The moon was considered as an omniscient and omnipotent being in his poetry, embodying its static beauty and dynamic power. When translating the different moon imagery into English, different translators have employed a variety of approaches to reproduce fully its role in the corresponding poetic context. Shifting the narrative perspective, handpicking the descriptive adjectives, adjusting the word order and adopting the specific sentence patterns can be the four main translating methods for his poetry. Based on the classification of the moon imagery, this article will concentrate on the comparison of the use of different translating methods by three translators with different cultural backgrounds in relation to three of Su Shi’s poems, aiming at revealing which method is more acceptable for the construction of the moon imagery in a particular poem and how important the cultural knowledge is for a better poetic translation.
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Sociological Approaches to Literary Translation: Methodologies, Potentials, Limitations
Tenglong Wan (University of Leeds, UK)
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Research on literary translation was traditionally set out from a linguistic or comparative literature point of view. Following the ‘cultural turn’ in the 1990s where studies on literary translation were expanded to explore its interplay with the various (cross-)cultural elements of the context in which it is produced, recent years have seen a ‘sociological turn’ in Translation Studies, which has provided even more fertile ground for research on literary translation, as it has broadened not only our scope of research but also our research methodologies from a merely product-oriented approach to an integrated approach of product-, participant- and context-orientations. This paper sets out to outline the existing sociological approaches to the study of literary translation against the backdrop of the ‘sociological turn’ for which Toury’s DTS has laid the foundation (Merkle, 2008, p.176). By reviewing the diverse methodologies drawn upon from the sociological paradigms applicable to Translation Studies, this paper seeks to map out innovative, integrated and interdisciplinary approaches to researching literary translation. Meanwhile, it also presents a critical reflection of the potentials and limitations of the sociological approaches to the study of literary translation.