Yixuan Deng

TRANSLATING WOMEN’S BODY, SEXUALITY AND VOICE IN MODERN CHINA: THE CASE OF XIAO HONG INTO ENGLISH

Since the “cultural turn” in the 1990s, translation is no longer regarded as a “pure linguistic” transition between the source language and the target language, but “a form of intercultural mediation located in a specific sociocultural and ideological setting” (Munday 2006, 195). The “cultural turn” also encourages feminist scholars to pay special attention to issues related to gender, identity and ideology in the field of translation studies. Within the framework of feminist translation theories, various issues have been examined from a feminist perspective, with a primary focus on literary works about women’s subordinate status at home and in the society; however, these studies have mostly been on the Indo-European languages and fewer studies have been done in a Chinese context. Studies on the translation of Chinese women writers are rather limited. The present study selects Chinese writer Xiao Hong (1911-42) as the case. Xiao was a prominent woman writer during the first wave of women’s writing in modern China of the early twentieth century. Her writings carry a strong sense of realism, with a focus on the marginalised and isolated lives of Chinese people in a time of turbulence. Xiao writes vividly about women whose lives, tragic but long ignorant, are filled with sufferings from illnesses and abuses, oppression from patriarchy, and unfortunes caused by wars and famines. Drawing on the case of Xiao Hong into English, systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is adopted as the analytical framework to conduct a bottom-up descriptive translation study (DTS). The researcher aims to analyse from a lexico-grammatical perspective to a macro-textual perspective: i) how women are portrayed in Xiao Hong’s writings in three different categories, body, sexuality, and voice; ii) whether any recurring translational shifts can be identified in Howard Goldblatt’s English translations of women’s body, sexuality and voice; iii) if any, to what extent the identified translational shifts influence the original female images; iv) on a macro-textual level, whether the original feminist messages are mitigated, retained or emphasised because of the identified shifts.

Pauline Henry-Tierney, School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University

Ya-Yun Chen, School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University

Hongwei Zhang, Hui Chen, Yixuan Deng, Zhirou Ma, Xuening Yao, Comments on the Translation of Child, Youth and Family Services Act, 2017, of Canada (Beijing: Intellectual Property Publishing House)