Female Power in Translation: A Gender-based Approach to Studying the Translation of Contemporary Feminist Fiction.

摘要

This thesis looks, from a gender perspective, into the translation of contemporary feminist fiction from Chinese to English and vice versa. In the thesis, the relationship among three interrelated domains, namely, gender, translation and power, is carefully examined. The role played by male as opposed to female translators in translating contemporary feminist fiction is further discussed by conducting case studies to investigate multiple translations of two pieces of feminist writing.;The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter introduces the research background and reviews previous studies examining translation using gender perspectives. The second chapter offers a theoretical framework for the current study. Taking Foucault's theory of power/discourse as a starting point, it demonstrates the relationship between power and discourse (feminist writing and translations), and argues 1) that feminist writing proclaims female power; 2) that translation can, on the one hand, transmit and strengthen that power and, on the other hand, weaken that power by toning down the feminist consciousness inherent in the original text; and 3) that translation is actually an 'intermediary station' where power is negotiated and discourse (re)constructed.;By conducting case studies in which representative works of Chinese and English feminist writing, together with their translations, are carefully analyzed, the third and fourth chapters examine the trajectory of the female power's traveling from the source text to the target text. The C-E section discusses a novel (written by the Chinese feminist writer Hong Ying) and its English translations by Howard Goldblatt (complete translation) and Mu Lei (partial translation); the E-C section deals with the independent story extracted from Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and its three Chinese versions by one female and two male translators respectively. In both sections, the writers' feminist thoughts that embrace female power are specifically analyzed. In the study, it is found that male and female translations differ from each other, thus offering quite different pictures of the female power expressed by feminist writers and altering the reading experience.;The fifth chapter elaborates on how the translators' interpretation and translation might affect in the target text the feminist writers' expression of power, and discusses the translator's gender as an important variable that might affect the translation of feminist literary writings. In the last chapter, conclusions about and reflections on the current study are presented, followed by some suggestions for future research.;The current thesis, standing astride Translation and Gender Studies, has taken an interdisciplinary perspective to study the translations of contemporary feminist fiction. It is hoped that this study can offer some insights into the intersection between language and gender issues in translation and contribute to the development of the research domain of gender and translation.