《三国演义》英译本研究：描述翻译学理论的应用(外国语言文学学术论丛)(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)

作者：冯雷

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《三国演义》英译本研究：描述翻译学理论的应用(外国语言文学学术论丛)试读：

外国语言文学学术论丛

This work is mainly based on the dissertation approved for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University. Supervisor: Prof. A. E. Feinauer. Submission date: December, 2012.

Acknowledgements to the original dissertation

First I offer my sincerest gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Ilse Feinauer, who has supported me throughout my dissertation with her pa-tience, knowledge and scholarship whilst allowing me the room to work in my own way. I attribute the level of my Doctor’s degree to her encour-agement and effort and without her this book, too, would not have been completed or written. I also bene.ted tremendously from attending a few relevant workshops in the UK, Belgium and South Africa during the com-pletion of my dissertation. I would not have had the opportunities to attend these workshops without her recommendation.

Secondly I would like to express my appreciation to my friends Aileen Maas and Michael Maas. During my stay in Stellenbosch, they kept giv-ing me courage and support almost every time we had the opportunity to get together. Their support greatly facilitated the completion of this book. Aileen also kindly offered to read all the chapters of this book and gave me valuable feedback and suggestions which without doubt improved the quality of this project. I would also like to thank Ms Amy Yu, my former colleague at Stellenbosch, who contributed to my decision on taking Trans-lation Studies as a research topic.

Finally I thank my parents and my wife Li Li for supporting me throughout all my studies, especially at Stellenbosch University. The home my wife has provided for me has made it possible to complete my research and the writing of this book.Chapter 1Introduction1.1Background of the study

Chinese culture and Western culture differ greatly from each other. It is well known that a good understanding of some aspects of a certain culture can undoubtedly facilitate the mastery of a specific language. Furthermore, the Chinese language is very different from English and most of the other European languages in a number of ways. Compared to more than 400 million Chinese learners of English,[1] there are only forty million foreign learners of Chinese[2] around the world, although this number is increasing fast as China is beginning to play an increasingly important role globally. Chinese books and newspaper articles are written in Chinese characters, which are different from the Roman alphabet, and Westerners who are used to reading Romanized script .nd Chinese characters dif.cult to master. It usually takes longer for Western learners of Chinese to learn to read Chinese than for Chinese learners to learn to read English.

In some European countries, where citizens have had contact with China through Christian missionaries for centuries, Chinese studies and studies related to China are not new .elds of research or interest. In the United States of America, the development of Chinese studies has accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century, and in some fields Americans have surpassed Europeans in research on China (cf. Yu 1997). Various academic institutions offering courses in Chinese studies have in fact been established in the United States, of which the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University are among the most famous.

As the Chinese writing system[3] is fundamentally different from that of most Western languages, difficulties arise for Western learners of Chinese. Very few undergraduate students who have studied Chinese for two or three years are able to read Chinese newspaper articles, let alone Chinese books. Most of the Westerners who are interested in China and wish to learn more about the country and culture have to read English translations of Chinese books or English articles written by researchers on China. Trustworthy translations are therefore immensely important, since they can give readers insight into the source text (hereafter ST) as well as into some of the cultural and historical customs and morals of the source culture.

The Chinese civilization has a history of over 3,000 years, which has left the world with a great number of valuable classics. It is estimated that the number of Chinese classics produced before 1911[4] was between 80,000 and 100,000. In 2008, the .rst list of Chinese classics was announced after it had been approved by the State Council. The list included 2,392 books,

of which 2,282 were written in Chinese characters and 110 in languages of different minority groups in China. According to a survey, during the one hundred years of the last century, nearly 100,000 Western classics were translated into Chinese, but the number of Chinese classics that were translated into Western languages was only 500 (Wang & Wang 2009: 2). This unbalanced situation suggests that more Chinese books are waiting to be translated and that more quali.ed translators need to be trained in order to increase Westerners’ knowledge of China, since translations of Chinese texts still form the basis of the West’s understanding of China.

Literary works are considered an important enhancement of the teaching of Chinese language and culture to foreign learners. Sanguo Yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Three Kingdoms[5]) is the .rst of the “Four Great Chinese Classics” (cf. 2.1). The reasons for choosing Sanguo Yanyi and its translations as the current research topic will be further discussed in 2.5.11. In reference to the two complete English translations, a number of questions immediately arise, such as why the translators undertook such a project, what the translations look like, for whom the translations were made, which translation is more suitable for students of Chinese, what approaches the translators have used to achieve better effects and why a new translation was produced. These questions are central to this study, and will be addressed throughout the subsequent chapters.

[1] www.bj.chinanews.com/news/2010/0312/6753.html. Retrieved on 2 September 2011.

[2] www.chinese.people.com.cn/GB/13471561.html. Retrieved on 2 September 2011.

[3] Chinese language is recorded in the form of characters, i.e. ideographs. There are about 1,500 to 2,000 commonly-used characters, though the total number can be as many as 50,000. Even native speakers of Chinese, when they start to receive education, have to devote great effort and time to learning to recognize and write out the characters correctly.

[4] The year 1911 marks the end of the last Chinese feudal empire.

[5] These are the titles of the two complete English translations to be studied.1.2Brief background information on the two translations and translators

This study focuses on two complete English translations of Sanguo Yanyi. These two translations are considered to be the most popular among Western readers (cf. France 2000: 232). The details of the two target texts (hereafter TTs) are provided below, with brief background information on each publication and translator.

Translation 1: Romance of the Three Kingdoms Translated by C. H. Brewitt-Taylor Reset and published by Tuttle Publishing in 2002 Pages: 1,360 (Volume 1: 690 and Volume 2: 670) ISBN: 0-8048-3467-9

Brewitt-Taylor’s translation was first published in two volumes in Shanghai in 1925. It was reprinted in the United States by the Charles E. Tuttle Company in Rutland, Vermont in 1959 and simultaneously published in Tokyo. This translation was the .rst full English translation of any of the major traditional Chinese novels. In this translation, the old Wade-Giles System[1] was used to translate proper names. The translation, which focuses more on the story itself, supplies no notes on historical circumstances, but it was written in .uent and somewhat archaic English.

Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor (1857—1938) was an Englishman. He came to China in his twenties and worked as an of.cer in the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs in a number of Chinese cities. He spent most of his adult life in China. In addition to a successful career as a customs of.cial, he also achieved distinction as a scholar of Chinese. He was the .rst person to translate a full Chinese novel (i.e. Sanguo Yanyi) into English and became one of the pioneers who introduced this genre to the English-speaking world. In 2009, a biography of Brewitt-Taylor by Isidore Cyril Cannon was published in Hong Kong. This book, entitled Public Success, Private Sorrow, based on years of study and research, is “valuable reading for anyone studying the history of translation and the Western discovery of Chinese culture” (cf. Cannon 2009).[2]

Translation 2: Three Kingdoms (Chinese-English Bilingual Version) Translated by Moss Roberts Foreign Language Press (P.R.C) First Edition 2000 Pages: 3,115 ISBN: 7-119-02408-6

The translation by Roberts is the latest complete English translation. It uses the modern Pinyin name system.[3] In addition to the text, the translator also provides eleven maps of important battles and numerous notes. Roberts also wrote a seventy-eight-page afterword, “About Three Kingdoms”, to discuss the backgrounds and possible themes of the novel.

Roberts was born in New York and is Professor of Chinese at New York University. He is a member of the Columbia University Oriental Thought and Research Institute, a director of the Journal of Asian Scholars and a member of the Oriental Research Society of America.

Due to the fact that the novel Sanguo Yanyi is lengthy—120 chapters divided into many separate stories—translators often choose only one or a few chapters to translate. According to Guo Yu (2008), “from the publication of P.P. Thomas’s translation of The Death of the Celebrated Minister Tung-cho in 1820 to the publication of Moss Roberts’s unabridged translation of Three Kingdoms in 1994, seventeen different English translations, abridged or complete, have come into being in the past 170 years.” Even the translators of the two complete versions started with abridged versions.

Numerous articles have been published in Chinese journals on Roberts’s translation of Sanguo Yanyi. These articles include reviews, comments on translation strategies and theoretical analyses, and a few relevant quotations and comments are mentioned here. Zhang Haoran (2001) is of the opinion that Roberts’s translation “has a good choice of words as it relies on the context; also its images and characters have been fully reproduced and the style remains close to the original”. Zhang Haoran and Zhang Xijiu (2002) conclude that the translating techniques Roberts employed include literal translation, liberal translation, contextual ampli.cation and annotation. He Xianbin (2003) argues that Moss Roberts’s translation demonstrates that the polysystem theory cannot predict the strategies of an individual translator, and that English translations of Chinese works do not always have to be domesticated in order to gain acceptance among Western readers. Zhang Yu and Tian Cuiyun (2007) investigate the different approaches Roberts employed in trying to make his translation more .uent and natural.

A few papers that compare the two English translations also appeared in Chinese journals recently. Zhang Xiaohong (2007) introduces the idea of “translation purpose” from skopos theory and aims to demonstrate that the “purpose” affects the quality of the product by comparing the two English translations. Zhu Yuping (2008) compares the two English translations from a functionalist point of view. She finds that Brewitt-Taylor’s translation has made many more changes from the original text in order to make the stories more interesting to read, while Roberts’s translation is very loyal to the original text. Chen Xiaoli and Zhang Zhiquan (2011) use skopos theory as a guide to compare the translations of the chapter titles in these two translations. Their analysis shows that Brewitt-Taylor’s translation is more liberal, using such strategies as omission, rewriting and sense-for-sense translation. Roberts’s translation, on the other hand, is more literal, adopting a word-for-word strategy. They conclude that the two different styles of the TTs are brought about by different translation skopoi and translation briefs. The relevant research in Chinese will be discussed further in the next section.

In reference to articles and papers published on the English translations of the ST in Chinese, it is significant to note that not a single academic paper discussing the translations has been published in English. One of the reasons for this might be that very few Western researchers have a sound enough knowledge of the Chinese language to be able to read and understand the ST sufficiently. Any attempt at commenting on the TT without referring to the ST itself is not convincing, at least academically. This research therefore aims to .ll this gap since it discusses both TTs and compares them to the ST.

[1] Wade-Giles is a Romanization system (phonetic notation and transcription) for the Chinese language, mainly for proper names and cultural items. Wade-Giles was developed from a sys-tem produced by Thomas Wade in the mid-nineteenth century, and became a set form with the publication of Herbert Giles’s Chinese-English dictionary in 1892. Wade-Giles was the main system of transcription of Chinese language in the English-speaking world for most of the twentieth century. Wade-Giles was used in several standard reference books and in almost all books about China published before 1979, when the new Chinese Spelling System started to become accepted internationally.

[2] Brief introduction found on the .ap of the book cover of Cannon’s Public Success, Private Sorrow.

[3] “Pinyin” is short for “Hanyu Pinyin”. It was adopted by the People’s Republic of China in 1958 as a newly designed phonetic scheme to facilitate the promulgation of the standard Chinese language. The scheme is a Romanized system functioning to annotate standard Chi-nese pronunciation with Roman letters. The system was adopted in 1979 by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as the standard Romanization for modern Chinese (ISO-7098: 1991). It has also been accepted by the government of Singapore, the Library of Congress, the American Library Association, and many other international institutions. For both Chinese natives and foreigners learning to speak Chinese and to enter Chinese language text into computers, Pinyin has become a useful tool.1.3Overview of research conducted on the translations of Sanguo Yanyi

According to investigations carried out by the researcher, numerous articles and papers on the English translations of Sanguo Yanyi have been published in Chinese language journals over the past two decades. Luo (2009), for instance, collected nine papers on the topic in question and brie.y comments on them. Most of these articles are only a few pages long and focus on one (small) aspect relating to the translation(s). More research has been done on Roberts’s latest translation than on Brewitt-Taylor’s. In this section, some of the available articles will be examined in order to provide an overview of research on translations of Sanguo Yanyi.

Zhou & Zhou’s paper (1988) “On the English Translations of Sanguo Yanyi” compares and discusses Brewitt-Taylor’s translation and Zhang Yiwen’s abridged translation (Chapters 43–50). Judged against Yan Fu’s three criteria xin (faithfulness), da (expressiveness) and ya (elegance), Zhou & Zhou (1988) consider Brewitt-Taylor’s translation as an excellent work in general and they mention that, in regard to the style and rhetoric, his translation also excels. They do refer to problems found in Brewitt-Taylor’s translation, including errors caused by misreading Chinese characters; misunderstanding words, idioms and poems in the original text; and being too exuberant or .ashy from time to time which leads to inaccuracy (Zhou & Zhou 1988). They also mention omissions caused by the translator’s failure to understand the original; and failure to translate the implied intentions in the original text. Sometimes the translator’s lack of knowledge of Chinese historical background also causes mistranslation (cf. Zhou & Zhou 1988).

Zhang (2001) comments on Moss Roberts’s translation of Sanguo Yanyi and gives a brief analysis of the English version. This version, according to Zhang, shows the following striking features: (1) a good choice of words as it relies on the context; (2) the images and personalities of the characters have been fully reproduced and the style remains close to the original (Zhang 2001). The examples below illustrate Zhang’s point of view.

The following example, discussed by Zhang (2001), compares Roberts’s translation with another translated version of Sanguo Yanyi and Zhang argues that Roberts’s version better transfers the style of the original text.

ST (Chapter 43):

肃接檄文观看。其略曰：“孤近承帝命，奉词伐罪。旄麾南指， 刘琮束手；荆襄之民，望风归顺。今统雄兵百，上将千员，欲与将军会猎于江夏，共伐刘备，同份土地，永结盟好。幸勿观望，速赐回音。”[1]

Roberts’s translation:

Cao’s note said: Under a recent imperial mandate, I have authority to act against state criminals. Our banners tilted southward; Liu Zong bound his hands in submission. The populace of Jingzhou, sensing the direction of events (extra space), has transferred its allegiance to us. We have one million hardy warriors and a thousand able generals. We propose that you join us, General, in a hunting expedition to Jiangxia in order to strike the decisive blow against Liu. Then, sharing the territory between us, we may seal an everlasting amity. Please do not hesitate but favour us with a speedy reply.

Another version:

Lu Su read the letter, the gist of which was as follows: “At the emperor’s command, I have led my army south to punish the guilty. Liu Cong has been captured, his people have surrendered, and I now command a force of a million picked men and a thousand able generals. I hope, you will join me, general, in a hunting expedition at Jiangxia to attack Liu Bei, so that we can divide his territory between us and pledge everlasting friendship. Do not hesitate, but give me an early reply!”

The original text is part of an of.cial call to arms. Admitting that both translations are .uent, Zhang (2001) argues that the second translation does not seem formal enough to transfer the style, while Roberts’s translation is both .uent and faithful.

Zhang (2001) also points out some minor problems existing in Roberts’s translation. These problems were caused mainly by the translator’s failure to understand some culture-speci.c references correctly. The following is one of the examples given:

ST (Chapter 45, emphasis added):

瑜曰：“子翼良苦：远涉江湖，为曹氏作说客耶？”干愕然曰：“吾久别足下，特来叙旧，奈何疑我作说客也？”

Roberts’s translation (Chapter 45, emphasis added):

“My friend, you have taken great trouble, coming so far to serve as Cao Cao’s spokesman,” Zhou Yu responded. Taken aback, Jiang Gan said, “We have been apart so long, I came especially to reminisce. How could you suspect me of such a thing?”

According to Zhang (2001), “说客 ” should be translated as “emissary”[2] instead of “spokesman”, which simply refers to someone who speaks on behalf of another. But in the novel, it is Jiang Gan’s mission to persuade his old school-mate Zhou Yu to surrender to Cao Cao. Jiang Gan’s character should be an “emissary” or “envoy”, “a person sent as a diplomatic representative on a special mission” (OED).

The seven examples provided in Zhang’s paper are all taken from Chapters 43–50. These examples are representative enough in scope and typicality and the research is based on the traditional prescriptive and evaluative approach.

Zhang & Zhang (2002) discuss the strategies used by Roberts to translate realia (culture-specific elements). They identify and examine four major strategies, namely literal or word-for-word translation, free or sense-for-sense translation, contextual amplification and annotation (Zhang & Zhang 2002). Literal translation seems to be Roberts’s preferred translation strategy and he employed it frequently as long as the translated text was understandable and expected to be accepted by the intended readers. Free translation was used when translating metaphors and when translating .gurative meanings of some culture-specific terms. Roberts used contextual amplification, which in this context mostly incorporates addition, to clarify and to elaborate on hidden meanings or background knowledge that the modern Western reader might not be familiar with. Annotation was used to explain historical background or allusions, and to correct errors in the original text.

Xianbin He (2003) uses the polysystem theory to analyze Roberts’s translation. He argues that the often-quoted polysystem theory runs counter to the free-translation practice in Late Qing (around AD 1900) in China. He’s (2003) analysis of Roberts’s complete source-oriented version of Sanguo Yanyi demonstrates that the polysystem theory cannot predict the strategies of an individual translator, and that English translations of Chinese works do not always have to be domesticated in order to gain acceptance among Western readers (cf. He 2003). He (2003) further argues that when discussing the choice of translation strategies, it is necessary to differentiate the translational orientations of a socio-cultural group and its individuals, and to interpret their translational actions with different theories and methods.

In Zhang & Tian’s (2007) article A Translator’s Creativity as Exemplified in the Translated Version of “Three Kingdoms” they focus on translation as a creative process. They also discuss Roberts’s translation, which they consider a success: “[the] translator’s creative approach plays an important role in order to produce a successful translation in which Western readers can fully appreciate the quality of the original Chinese text” (Zhang & Tian 2007). The article aims to study how to make translations .uent and natural when translating classical Chinese literary works for native English readers whose

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