Translated Abstract
The flourishing of the feminist movement has already planted the root in the field of translation due to the similar position of women and translations, being inferior to and discriminated against men and original works. The influence of feminist movement on translations has led to the emerging of many outstanding feminist translators with their own feminist translation theories. The study of feminine languages in English has been going on for a long time and is quite mature with abundant researches upon the Chinese translations of famous English feminist writings. However, the studies of the English translations of writings by Chinese female/women writers are far from enough.
This paper studies the English translations of three novels by Ding Ling, namely, When I Was in Xia Village, The Halmet, and Shanghai in the Spring of 1930 (2), aiming to find how W.J.F. Jenner, the British male translator translates the languages with feminine features in all the three works. On the basis of the accepted standards of gender language proposed by scholars like O Jespersen, Lakoff and so on, feminine language features existing in both Chinese and English are chosen and used as parameters in the textual analysis.
By a close textual analysis in both the micro and macro aspects, this paper evaluates and compares the original Chinese feminine languages (gender languages) with their corresponding English translations. In the micro aspect, the discussion is carried out on two levels: the lexicon level and the syntactic level. On the lexicon level, words like intensifiers, expletives and color adjectives are closely studied. While on the syntactic level, exclamatory sentences and sentences with hedges are compared and evaluated. This study examines the translation of feminine features and compares the effects of revealing the special feminist awareness by putting them back to the content of the original and the translations. In the macro studies, the overall images of the three heroines of these works, Purity, Miss Tertia, and Mary are analyzed and compared by evaluating the description of their physical appearances and their manner of speaking.
It is found that, on the micro level, the male translator does not succeed in fully conveying most of the feminine features of the original work embedded in both word choices and sentences due to the difference in gender and social status between men and women. It is further concluded that the male translator altered the way these heroines speak by using masculine languages to replace the original feminine languages with his own interpretations of the images of these heroines reflected in the translations. Furthermore, through the comparative study of the feminine features in the translations in both the macro and micro perspectives, this paper further confirms that the male translator consciously or unconsciously employs his male dominance in translating these works, thus further stressing the possibility that women translators or translators with gender awareness might be better at rendering feminine languages. Hopefully, this study could shed lights on future research in this field.
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