A Thesis Presented to the Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation National Taiwan Normal University

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE OF TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION NATIONAL TAIWAN NORMAL UNIVERSITY

CSI

CSI Shanghai: the English and French Translation of Culture-Specific Items from Two Eileen Chang Short Stories

Advisee: Margaret Katherine Hayslip

Advisor: Dr. Daniel Hu

July 2019

lexical units culture-specific items, CSIs meaningconnotation source languagetarget language

foreignizationdomestication

neutralization lexicalization semantic regularitysynonymy cultural transposition

Kingsbury Patton Péchenart

Abstract

To a certain extent, all language is a reflection of the culture in which it originates; yet, there are some lexical units which are inextricably culture-bound. Known as culture- specific items (CSIs), these words and/or expressions refer to abstract ideas or concrete objects which only exist in a given language-culture or deviate in meaning or connotation when rendered into another. Since each has its own particular degree of opacity and cultural specificity, some may prove transparent and accessible, while others obscure and unrecognizable. Elusive by nature, CSIs do not simply exist in and of themselves—their actualization depends on the source- and target-language pair in question, the textual function of the given item, and the context of publication. This thesis attempts to explore the interesting challenge of non-equivalence such items pose to the translator, who is tasked with conveying their referents across intercultural gaps and linguistic borders. Traditionally, approaches to their treatment have been classed as either foreignizing or domesticating, but scholars have begun to remodel this time-worn dichotomy into a fluid spectrum to highlight intermediate alternatives. Exploring a wide range of possibilities, this thesis investigates how CSIs are treated in translation from Chinese into English and French, seeking to determine if they are preserved, neutralized or replaced by target-culture equivalents. As compared to previous selective studies which limit analysis to specific CSI categories, this study takes a more comprehensive, inclusive approach and examines the translation of all items which meet stipulated selection criteria. This thesis also proposes a new framework to evaluate and classify the translation procedures by which Chinese CSIs are processed. Building upon existing models in the literature, this framework accounts for (un)lexicalization, semantic (ir)regularity, and (non)synonymy, and consists of nine procedures which contribute to three overall translation strategies, i.e. foreignization, domestication, and most importantly neutralization. The data is then subjected to quantitative analysis to determine the distribution of CSI procedures and cultural transposition value of each target text. For the purposes of this investigation, two Eileen Chang stories, entitled (“Deng”) and (“Guihua”), and their English and French translations were selected as primary source material. Data was collected from the eight texts—four of which being produced by Chang as author and translator—and compiled into trilingual CSI corpora. The findings of this analysis indicate that, regardless of translator or target language, CSIs were more often than not neutralized and extreme procedures were typically avoided. However, there were discrepancies between translators’ approaches. Whereas the English translators Kingsbury and Patton adopted more cautious and moderate orientations, the French translator Péchenart and self-translator Chang experimented more with unlexicalized and ungrammatical language. However, translators, particularly Chang, did not treat CSIs uniformly across texts. As part of its important academic contribution, this case study demonstrates the validity of quantitative analysis of CSI translation and its potential for enriching and substantiating qualitative research. The framework proposed herein can also be adapted for use in other translation studies research, thus facilitating contrastive textual analysis across different language pairs, texts, and authors.

Keywords: culture-specific items; quantitative translation analysis; Eileen Chang self- translation; foreignization; domestication; neutralization

Table of Contents CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION...... 1 RESEARCH AIMS ...... 1 INTRODUCING THE SOURCE TEXTS ...... 3 BACK TO THE BEGINNING: RESEARCH ORIENTATION ...... 4 TRANSLATION OF CHANG’S WORKS INTO ENGLISH AND FRENCH ...... 5 CHOICE OF TEXTS ...... 9 OUTLINE ...... 10 TABLE 1 : SHORT STORIES IN TRANSLATION ...... 11 TABLE 2: MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS IN TRANSLATION ...... 12 TABLE 3: FULL-LENGTH WORKS IN TRANSLATION ...... 12 CHAPTER 2. THE WRITER AND HER WORKS ...... 13 EILEEN CHANG, A LIFE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST ...... 13 THE TWO SHORT STORIES: “DENG” AND “GUIHUA” ...... 16 Chang as self-translator: working from Chinese into English ...... 18 “Deng”...... 19 “Guihua” ...... 29 CHAPTER 3. THE NATURE OF CSIS AND APPROACHES TO THEIR TREATMENT ...... 49 FROM THE “LITERAL VS. FREE” DICHOTOMY TO NEW AVENUES OF CULTURAL INQUIRY ...... 49 A GLANCE BACK AT THE LITERATURE ON CSIS ...... 50 SO WHAT ARE CSIS?...... 52 APPROACHES TOWARDS THE STUDY OF CSIS ...... 55 CATEGORIZATIONS OF CSI TRANSLATION PROCEDURES ...... 57 A (NOT VERY) NEW DICHOTOMY: VENUTI’S FOREIGNIZATION VS. DOMESTICATION ...... 57 BEYOND FOREIGNIZATION AND DOMESTICATION ...... 58 FACTORS TO CONSIDER ...... 62 OMISSION: A DOMESTICATING PROCEDURE? ...... 64 CHAPTER 4. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY ...... 66 LOCATING THE TEXTS ...... 66 RESEARCHING AND SELECTING CSIS ...... 66 CONSTRUCTING (AND CATEGORIZING) THE CSI CORPORA ...... 67 IDENTIFYING CHANG’S CHANGES TO THE TEXTS ...... 72 ESTABLISHING A TRANSLATION PROCEDURE FRAMEWORK AND CATEGORIZING PROCEDURES ...... 72 ANALYZING THE DATA AND INTERPRETING RESEARCH FINDINGS ...... 73 CONVERTING FINDINGS INTO STATISTICS ...... 75 CHAPTER 5. FRAMEWORK FOR THE CATEGORIZATION OF CSI TRANSLATIONS ...... 77 CATEGORIZATION OF CSI TRANSLATION BY PROCEDURE ...... 77 THE TRANSLATION PROCEDURES ...... 78 Unlexicalized transliteration (UT) ...... 78 Unlexicalized transliteration + explicitation (UT + EXPCT) ...... 81 Unlexicalized transliteration + explanation (UT + EXPLN) ...... 84 Semantically anomalous translation or paraphrase (SA) ...... 88 Semantically systematic reference to the source culture (SS) ...... 91 Culture-neutral explanation (CNE)...... 93 Omission (OM) ...... 95 Cultural analogy (CA) ...... 98 Cultural substitution (CS) ...... 99 CHAPTER 6. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF RESULTS ...... 104 1. HOW ARE CSIS HANDLED IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH TRANSLATION? ...... 105 2. HOW DO INDIVIDUAL TRANSLATORS RENDER CSIS? ...... 106

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3. DO TRANSLATORS HANDLE CSIS IN THE SAME MANNER ACROSS TEXTS? ...... 112 CHAPTER 7. CONCLUSION ...... 119 WORKS CITED ...... 121 APPENDIX A: “DENG” CSI SOLUTIONS BY TRANSLATOR AND PROCEDURE ...... 125 APPENDIX B: “GUIHUA” CSI SOLUTIONS BY TRANSLATOR AND PROCEDURE ...... 128 APPENDIX C: “DENG” AND “GUIHUA” AGGREGATED DATA ...... 131 APPENDIX D: “DENG” CULTURE-SPECIFIC ITEMS ...... 132 APPENDIX E: “GUIHUA” CULTURE-SPECIFIC ITEMS ...... 147

Chapter 1. Introduction

“She could with a single phrase take you hostage. Chinese readers can’t forget her; most Western readers have never met her” (Fisher, 2015, para. 2). Eileen Chang has been revered for decades in Taiwan, Hong Kong, overseas Chinese communities, and more recently in post-Mao China, but she has only just recently come onto the scene in the West, where, over the past decade, her stories have been translated into multiple languages and adapted to the silver screen. The recent attention that her work has garnered comes more than fifty years after renowned literary critic C. T. Hsia first hailed her stories as classics (Thomas, 1995). Another long-time supporter, professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University, David Der-wei Wang, writes that Chang is “arguably the most talented woman writer in twentieth century China” (Wang, 2010, p. v). Favorably compared to writers as diverse as Katherine Mansfield, Joan Didion, Flannery O’Connor, and Franz Kafka, Eileen Chang is beloved for her “hauntingly precise, achingly beautiful” prose and meditations on romantic love, domestic discord, betrayal, and desolation (Thomas, 1995; Fisher, 2015; Kingsbury, 2007, p. xii). Her writing style is unique within Chinese literature of the mid-20th century, which more often than not advocates a strong political ideology. Unlike her confrères, Chang was interested in vividly capturing the sights, sounds, and smells of mid-century urban China and “simply wanted to explore the...thoughts and feelings of ordinary, imperfect people struggling through the day-to-day dislocations caused by war and modernization” (Lovell, 2007, p. xiii). Her writing, at once elegant and biting, drew a loyal following among Chinese readers outside the Mainland and even inspired generations of “Chang school” creative writers in Taiwan and Hong Kong (Louie, 2012).

Research Aims

The culmination of this project can be traced back, at its most incipient, to a course on the writings of Eileen Chang, taught in the spring of 2014 by Wu Tao-yuan at NTNU’s Mandarin Training Center in Taipei, Taiwan. This was my first introduction to the life and writings of cult icon Chang and the semester would prove to be pivotal in my life. It was during this period, with the encouragement of my teacher and mentor Wu Tao-yuan, that I decided to pursue graduate studies in Taiwan yet to break off the relationship which had

originally brought me to the island and inspired me to study Chinese in the first place. Fully immersed in the poignant realism of Chang’s writings, I was granted access to a stimulating space in which to further explore Chinese language and a new perspective from which to understand traditional Chinese culture. It is rare, however, that a culture be wholly isolated from and untouched by the outside world, and Chang’s œuvre is by no means homogenous in its cultural identity. Typically set in 1940s foreign-occupied Shanghai and Hong Kong, Chang’s stories are products of the cosmopolitan environments in which they were written. They represent custom-made hybrids of East and West, tradition and modernity, and are dappled with references specific to Chinese and Western ways of life. Such references pose a unique problem for the translator and it is this translation “problem,” or phenomenon, which the present study aims to investigate. In particular, this thesis seeks to analyze how culture-specific items, or CSIs, are translated from Chinese into English and French, and to determine if CSIs tend to be preserved, neutralized, or replaced in each. Unlike other studies which limit their scope to a purely qualitative analysis of specific pre-selected categories of CSI, this thesis aims to adopt a more inclusive approach and will analyze all lexical elements (and their counterparts) which meet an established set of CSI selection criteria. This qualitative analysis will then be complemented by quantitative data to provide a more global perspective of CSI treatment by story, translator, and target language. By eschewing category restrictions and providing both quantitative and qualitative data, this study aims to offer new insight into CSIs and their translation. Furthermore, this study seeks to give greater prominence to “Shame, Amah!” ( ) and “Little Finger Up” (), two of Chang’s works which have received significantly less attention from readers and scholars alike, especially abroad. Apart from Chang’s full-length novel Half a Lifelong Romance () and the novellas which inspired the popular film adaptations “Red Rose White Rose” () and “Lust, Caution” (), the best-known of Chang’s published works remains the collection Romances ( ) and the ten short stories featured within. In the past decade, significant academic attention has been paid to Chang’s three posthumously published semi-autobiographical novels, The Fall of the Pagoda (), The Book of Change (), and Little Reunions (). Translation-oriented research, meanwhile, has continued to center either on Chang’s blurring of the line between (re)writing

and translation, her Chinese translations of Western literature, notably that of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, or her critically acclaimed self-translation “The Golden Cangue” (), translated into English from the original Chinese (Lin, 2012). However, only a few studies, such as Lin (2012) and Hsu (2013) have begun to investigate translatorial contributions from other parties, thus there is still room for more discussion and analysis. If we only consider that which has been written in English or any other language apart from Chinese, there is a glaring paucity of research on Chang (Lee, 2012). “Until recently, only a few scholars in the West had researched her work, and even this was mostly due to C. T. Hsia’s claim in his authoritative 1961 book...that she was ‘the best and most important writer in Chinese today” (Louie, 2012, p. 2). This study accordingly has been carried out in response to the call of Chang scholars from East and West for more research and shall seek to help fill this research gap. This thesis takes two of Chang’s lesser-known works as its focus and develops discussion around a trilingual corpus drawn from Chang’s own self-translations along with their alternate English and French translations. In so doing, this trilingual contrastive analysis endeavors to create a richer understanding of both CSIs and the cultural lens through which Chang is presented to Anglo- and Francophone readers around the world. To summarize, this thesis seeks to address the following research questions: 1. How are CSIs handled in English and French translation? Are CSIs preserved, neutralized, or replaced with analogous target-culture or third-culture references? 2. How do individual translators render CSIs? Do Chang, Kingsbury, Patton, and Péchenart adopt similar CSI strategies? 3. Do translators handle CSIs in the same manner across texts?

Introducing the source texts

The starting point of this research is of course the two Chinese short stories (“Guihua”) and (“Deng”), which were translated into English by Chang herself as “Shame, Amah!” and “Little Finger Up.”1 In Chinese, these stories can be found in various collections published by Crown in Taiwan dating as far back as 1968, when Chang first granted the publishing house copyright to her work.

1 For the sake of clarity, and especially since for each source text there also exists an alternate English translation by another name, this thesis will utilize the above-noted pinyin romanizations when referring to the original Chinese texts.

For the purposes of this thesis, I have used the 18-volume 2010 edition of Chang’s collected writings, which is available at popular commercial and smaller second-hand bookstores across Taiwan and comprises a wide-ranging assortment of short stories, essays, translations, full-length novels, and semi-autobiographical works. More specifically, CSI data for use in this thesis was drawn from the second volume of the collection, in which “Guihua” and “Deng” are presented alongside nine other short stories, all originally published between 1944 and 1945. Within the 314-page volume organized chronologically by initial date of publication, “Guihua” is the eighth story featured and runs 23 pages long, while “Deng,” follows just after and is 15 pages in length. Although certain stories in the volume, e.g. the well-known (“Red Rose, White Rose”) from which the volume takes its name and cover art inspiration, are accompanied by illustrations of characters sketched by the author, no such visuals are appended to either of the stories under analysis in the present study. The only supplemental information provided about either is found after the final line of text and concerns initial publication. According to these editorial notes, both stories were published in December of 1944; “Guihua” originally appeared in the Nanjing-based prose magazine “Bitter Bamboo Monthly” ()—founded by Chang’s then-husband Hu Lan-cheng—and “Deng” in a Shanghai periodical named (“Magazine”).

Back to the Beginning: Research orientation

It is important to note that these stories were not chosen arbitrarily or on the basis of personal preference. From the outset, I was interested in exploring how Chang’s Chinese writings have been translated abroad, especially into my two other working languages: English, my mother tongue, and French, the language and literature in which I majored at university. Apart from adding meaning to this endeavor for myself, the decision to undertake a tri- rather than bi-lingual contrastive study arguably enables a richer, more nuanced analysis and increases the potential generalizability of research findings. While English and French do not belong to the same language family, they are relatively similar from a linguistic standpoint, and thus discrepancies in translation would be easy to spot and intriguing as to their implications. Moreover, the two languages represent cultures with roughly commensurate ‘intercultural gaps’ between themselves and that of Chinese. In other words, the Chinese language and culture is more or less as ‘foreign’ to English speakers as it is to those who natively speak French. It seems plausible then that

English and French translators could handle cultural references in roughly the same manner, but that was left to be borne out in this study by contrastive textual analysis. With these tentative research objectives in mind, it was necessary to identify which titles had been translated into English, whether by Chang or others, and which had been translated into French.

Translation of Chang’s works into English and French

The results of the subsequent bibliographical research (see Tables 1-3 at end of chapter) indicated that there have been four discernible waves of Chang translation from Chinese into English and French. (Some English titles are original works, however, as Chang famously wrote in both her native Chinese and second language English, sometimes translating back and forth between the two languages.) Up to the mid-1990s, all published English versions of Chang’s work—some originals, some translations—were produced by her own hand. Anglophone readers who were interested in her writing could choose from a limited selection of four short stories and three novels: “Stalemates” (1956), “Little Finger Up” (1961), “Shame, Amah!” (1962), “The Golden Cangue” (1981), The Rice-Sprout Song (1955), Naked Earth (1956), and The Rouge of the North (1967). Francophone readers at the time weren’t so fortunate. In French, there were only two books available, both translations of The Rice-Sprout Song, but one translated (in 1958) from the English original and the other translated several decades later (in 1991) from the Chinese. Though Chang lived more than half of her life in the United States and wrote several essays and full-length novels in English, she was never able to achieve the same literary success in the West that she had enjoyed in Shanghai and remained relatively unknown until the end of her life. In fact, it wasn’t until 1995, the year in which she died, that translation of her works into English and French really began to pick up. Her death inspired a reexamination of her life and literary achievements, and a flurry of translations with it, which culminated the following spring in an entire issue of the translation journal Renditions2 specially devoted to her memory. Published by the Research Centre for Translation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, this single collaborative effort more than doubled the number of English translations of Chang’s works, adding five essays and four short stories to the count. These included “Dream of Genius” (), “What is Essential is that the Names

2 Hung, E. (Ed.) (1996) Eileen Chang [Special Issue]. Renditions: A Chinese-English Translation Magazine, 45.

be Right” (), “Intimate Words” (), “From the Ashes” (), “A Beating” (), “Love in a Fallen City” (), “Shutdown” (), “Great Felicity” (), and “Traces of Love” (). Four years later in 2000, the latter three appeared in a collection from the same publisher. That collection3 also included “Stalemates,” the only short story of Chang’s to have been written originally in English, and Simon Patton’s re- translation of “Guihua,” entitled “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn.” In the interim, two Chang novels were also republished by the University of California Press: The Rice Sprout Song (1998) and The Rouge of the North (1998). During roughly the same period, there was a similar uptick in French translations, with the publication of three Chang stories, i.e. “Attente”4 (1995; translation of “Deng”), “La cangue d’or” (1999; ), and “Rose rouge et rose blanche” (2001; ), all translated by Emmanuelle Péchenart. In the mid- to late-2000s, there was another surge of Chang translation within the Anglo- and Francophone worlds. This was in large part thanks to the 2007 release of “Lust, Caution,” the controversial film adaptation of Chang’s so-named novella, directed by the Taiwanese-American Academy-Award winner Ang Lee. This was by no means the first film adaptation of her work—it was in fact the fifth—but it was the first to launch a worldwide wave of interest in her writing (Duzan, 2015). In coordination with the film’s release, various collections of Chang’s short stories with covers bearing sexually suggestive shots from the film appeared in both English and French. This was a turning point in terms of Chang’s reception in the West—Lee had thrust her into the limelight—and translations which had formerly been restricted to a relatively unknown publisher in Asia were now reprinted by two well-known in the West: Penguin and Anchor Books (a division of then Random House). Similarly, in France, the film tie-in collection was not published by Bleu de Chine, the independent Sinophile publisher which had been a key early promoter of Chang’s work, but rather by Éditions Robert Laffont, one of the country’s leading publishing houses. In addition to “Lust, Caution,” the English collections presented previously published translations from the Hong Kong consortium, but also “In the Waiting Room,” Karen S. Kingsbury’s re-translation of “Deng.” The French collection, in contrast, offered a completely new set of translations: “Bouclage” (), “La

3 Hung, E. (Ed.) (2000) Traces of love and other stories. Hong Kong: Renditions Paperbacks (The Chinese University of Hong Kong). 4 In the collection: Péchenart, E. (Ed.). (1995). Shanghai 1920-1940: Douze récits. Paris: Bleu de Chine.

faïencerie” (), “Le méridien du cœur” (), and of course “Amour, luxure, trahison (Lust, caution).” That same year, a separate collection of Chang’s short stories—unrelated to the film but riding the wave of its success—was published in the U.S. by New York Review of Books. Promoted as a NYRB Classic, the collection reprinted Chang’s celebrated self-translation “The Golden Cangue” and offered several translations by Chang devotee Kingsbury, who has said the beauty and magnetic pull of Chang’s writing was what initially inspired her to translate (Yi, 2017). Titles in this work included “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier” ( ), “Jasmine Tea” (), “Sealed Off” () and “Red Rose, White Rose” ( ). Also published in 2007, but likely not targeted towards such a mainstream audience, was Chang’s English translation of Han Bang-qing’s 19th-century novel The Sing- song Girls of Shanghai. Its Mandarin counterpart, also translated by Chang from the original Wu dialect, had been published by Crown in Taiwan over two decades earlier (double-check date). At the time of Chang’s death, the English manuscript had been discovered unfinished among her possessions. Fortunately, Chang’s loyal admirer Eva Hung, the editor of Hong Kong’s Renditions, undertook its revision for publication. Even before “Lust, Caution” was released, new translations of Chang’s works had appeared in French and English. In 2005, Péchenart’s “Un amour dévastateur” () came into print; and that same year in the U.S., Written on Water () was published by Columbia University Press. The translation of this collection may not have drawn much attention outside of sinological circles, but it made a significant contribution to the body of Chang’s works available in English, opening up a new world of the author’s essays—31 in total—to an Anglophone audience. Just as the popular Romances (1944) had collected ten of Chang’s best-loved short stories and novellas, Written on Water (1945) collected many of her most notable essays, likewise penned at the peak of her career in early 1940s Shanghai. Its publication therefore marked a milestone in Chang translation into English, and it only seems fitting that it was brought forth by CUP, the publishing arm of the institution from which critic C.T. Hsia first famously hailed Chang as one of the Chinese literary greats. In the 2010s, a steady stream of new Chang titles have continued to materialize in English, French, and even Chinese. At the beginning of the decade, two semi- autobiographical novels The Fall of the Pagoda and The Book of Change were published, in the original English, by the affiliate of Chang’s alma mater, the Hong Kong University Press. Soon thereafter, the two were translated into Chinese by Zhao Pi-hui () and published

respectively as and by Crown in Taiwan. These publications followed on the heels of a controversial one, of Chang’s other semi-autobiographical work (Little Reunions) in 2009, which some doubted the author had ever meant to see the light of day. Whatever Chang’s intentions, many lifelong Chang aficionados were pleased to have three new works to pore over in Chinese, over a decade after their beloved author’s death. As for new English works, two have appeared over the past few years: Kingsbury’s translation of the heartrending classic Half a Lifelong Romance (), published by Anchor Books in 2016; and Little Reunions, the novel which struck up such a controversy among Chinese readers, translated by the Melbourne duo Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz, published by NYRB in 2018. Within the past five years, two new volumes of French translations have also been published, both translated by Péchenart and published in Paris by Zulma. The first, which bears the English title Love in a Fallen City, comprises the previously published “Un amour dévastateur” (the French translation of the work’s eponymous novella) and the newly translated “Ah Hsiao est triste en automne L’étuve aux fleurs d’osmanthe” (the French version of “Guihua”). The second volume, published the following year in 2015, presents the two “Aloeswood Incense” stories from Romances, “Copeaux de bois d’aloès: Premier brûle-parfum” () and “Copeaux de bois d’aloès: Second brûle-parfum” (). In the 76 years since Chang’s writing first captivated the readers of Shanghai, many of her short stories, novellas, essays, and full-length novels have been translated into English and/or French. It is my hope that this short history of the translation of Chang’s works, compiled to the best of my knowledge and ability, helps the reader to appreciate the multiple players and complex forces involved. Though there are certain individuals who figure prominently, such as Kingsbury, Hung, and Péchenart, no single translator, editor, academic institution, or publishing house is wholly responsible for all of the translations produced. These texts represent the collective efforts of numerous publishers, editors, and over a dozen translators. Perhaps this alone is suffice to demonstrate the enduring magnetism of Chang’s legacy.

Choice of texts

While the above-discussed process of bibliographical research was interesting and rewarding in itself, it was also necessary in order to establish the set of texts from which could be chosen the primary sources for this thesis. In total, out of Chang’s collected Chinese works, 12 short stories, 33 essays, and eight full-length novels have been translated into English; meanwhile, 11 short stories and one full-length novel have been translated into French. Among these, eight short stories have been translated into both (all highlighted rows): “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier” (), “Sealed Off”/“Shutdown” ( ), “Love In a Fallen City” (), “The Golden Cangue” (), “Red Rose, White Rose” (), “Guihua,” “Deng,” and “Lust, Caution” (). Of these eight, there are three which have a French translation as well as not one but two English translations (rows painted in dark gray); yet, there are only two, “Guihua” and “Deng,” for which exist an English self-translation, produced by the author herself in the early 1960s, and an alternate English version, completed decades later by someone else. For this special reason, and after careful consideration of research goals and design, I elected to exclude the story “Sealed Off”/“Shutdown” from analysis and to concentrate instead on the former two. These stories and their translations, perhaps especially the English, are quite interesting and worthy of academic consideration. Their very existence bears direct relevance to key discussions which have dominated the field of translation for centuries. Early on, translation practitioners like 17th-century poet John Dryden debated how an author might speak in a foreign (target) language; and then later, Schleiermacher and others considered whether it was preferable to move the target text reader to the source language writer or vice versa. In the case of “Shame, Amah!” and “Little Finger Up,” it is already evident, indeed communicated in black-and-white, how the author herself would write the same text in a foreign language. And Chang did not merely move herself closer to the Anglophone reader in a linguistic sense but also in a physical one. More than half a decade before these two translations were published, Chang had left Hong Kong and resettled in the United States to chase her American dream. It is noteworthy then that Patton and Kingsbury chose to re- translate stories for which English versions already exist, penned by the original author herself.

On the basis of the above considerations, I finally established “Guihua” and “Deng”—and their four English and two French translations—as the primary source material for this work.

Outline This thesis is composed of seven chapters, each concentrating on a different topic arising from my interdisciplinary research. Following this introduction, the second chapter presents a short biographical sketch of Eileen Chang, from her early years in Shanghai to her second marriage and later life spent in seclusion in Los Angeles. The chapter also provides synopses for“Deng” and “Guihua,” the two source texts under analysis, as well as overviews to the global revisions which Chang made to these texts in self- translation. The third chapter, or literature review for this study, introduces the thorny concept of culture-specific items (CSIs). In particular, I examine how they are rendered in translation and evaluated; outline the factors which may affect translation strategy; and take a special look at the controversial procedure of omission. The fourth chapter, entitled “Research Methodology,” identifies my research goals; traces the history of Chang translation into English, French, and Chinese; and discusses the choice of texts, selection of CSIs, organization of data, and method of quantitative analysis. Presenting the main contribution of this thesis, the fifth chapter proposes a new framework for the categorization and evaluation of CSI translations. This framework consists of nine procedures corresponding to three general translation strategies, namely foreignization, neutralization, and domestication. Then, following the practical application of this framework to the study corpora, the sixth chapter analyzes the resulting quantitative data: the distributions of CSI procedures and cultural orientation ‘scores’ by text and translator. Finally, based on these statistics and figures, I attempt to draw conclusions about the approaches of different translators to CSIs and consider how the general orientation of a translation may be correlated to its publisher and peritext. In conclusion, the seventh chapter summarizes the findings of my research, acknowledges its limitations, and suggests potential extensions of academic inquiry.

Table 1 : Short Stories in Translation Chinese Text English Text English Translation French Translation (Eileen Chang) (Eileen Chang) (Karen S. Kingsbury unless (Emmanuelle Péchenart) otherwise noted) “Aloeswood Incense: “Copeaux de bois d’aloès: (1943, later in The First Brazier” (2007) Premier brûle-parfum” Romances5) (2015)

“Copeaux de bois d’aloès: (1943, later in Second brûle-parfum” (2015) Romances) “Jasmine Tea” (2007) (1943, later in Romances) “Le méridien du cœur” (1943, later in (2008) Romances) “Sealed Off” (1995); “Bouclage” (2008) (1943, later in “Shutdown” Romances) (Janet Ng & Janet Wickeri, 1996) “Love In a Fallen City” “Un amour dévastateur” (1943, later in (1996) (2005) Romances) “La faïencerie” (2008) (1943, later in Romances) “The Golden Cangue” (1981) “La Cangue d’or” (1999) (1943, later in Romances) “Great Felicity” (1944) (Janet Ng & Janet Wickeri, 1996) “Red Rose, White Rose” “Rose rouge et rose blanche” (1944) (2007) (2001) “Shame, Amah!” (1962) “Steamed Osmanthus Flower “Ah Hsiao est triste en “Guihua” (1944) Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Automne: L’étuve aux fleurs Autumn” d’osmanthe” (2014) (Simon Patton, 2000) “Little Finger Up” “In the Waiting Room” “Attente” (1995) “Deng” (1944) (1961) (2007) “Traces of Love” (1945) (Eva Hung, 1996) * “Stalemates” (1957) (1956)

* “Lust, Caution” “Amour, luxure, trahison” (1978) (Julia Lovell, 2007) (2008)

5 As of mid-2019, the only two short stories from Romances (1944) which remain untranslated into English or French are “Time of Youth” () and “Withered Flowers” ().

Table 2: Miscellaneous Essays in Translation (the first five were published in Renditions, No. 45.) “Dream of Genius” (Karen S. Kingsbury, 1996) “What is Essential is That the Names be Right” (Karen S. Kingsbury, 1996) “Intimate Words” (Janet Ng, 1996) “From the Ashes” (Oliver Stunt, 1996) “A Beating” (D.E. Pollard, 1996) “The Religion of the Chinese” (published in The Chinese Essay, an anthology translated and edited by David Pollard, 2002) Written on Water (Andrew F. Jones, 2005) (collection of 31 (includes alternate translations of , , , and ) essays, 1945)

Table 3: Full-length Works in Translation Chinese Text English Text French Translation (produced by Eileen Chang unless otherwise noted) The Rice-Sprout Song* (1955) Le chant du riz qui lève (anti-Communist novel) (translated from the English—Emy Molinié, 1958) Le chant de la jeune pousse de riz (translated from the Chinese—Francis Marche, 1991) Naked Earth (1956) (anti-Communist novel) The Rouge of the North (1967) (novel based on short story “The Golden Cangue”) The Sing-song Girls of (Mandarin translation of Han Shanghai Bangqing’s novel, originally written (revised and edited by Eva in Wu dialect) Hung, 2007) The Fall of the Pagoda* (translated into Chinese by ) (semi-autobiographical novel, 2010) The Book of Change* (translated into Chinese by ) (semi-autobiographical novel, 2010) Half a Lifelong Romance (romantic novel) (Karen S. Kingsbury, 2016) Little Reunions (semi-autobiographical novel, 2009) (Jane Weizhen Pan & Martin Merz, 2018)

Chapter 2. The Writer and Her Works

Eileen Chang, a life between East and West

Chang was born into a once distinguished aristocratic Shanghai family. Her great- grandfather was Li Hongzhang (), an influential statesman who played a leading role in foreign policy and the modernization of China during the late-Qing dynasty (Louie, 2012). However, by the time of her birth, the country was in a period of political and social upheaval, and the social status of Chang’s family had likewise declined (Kingsbury, 2007). Chang’s home life and upbringing were quite unstable. Her mother, an elegant, Westernized socialite was far from a devoted parent. When Eileen was only two years old, she left her daughter behind in Shanghai to live abroad in Europe where she studied art and famously skied the Swiss Alps with bound feet (Duzan, 2015). She stayed for five years, only coming back to take care of her children after getting word that her delinquent husband had almost fatally overdosed on opioids. After he had recovered from the overdose yet fallen back into his opium-and-concubine habit, they divorced and she once again set off for Europe, this time staying until Eileen was almost an adult (Kingsbury, 2007). Chang’s father was not simply an odium addict and philanderer; he also routinely beat female members of the household when his unpredictable temper flared up (Kingsbury, 2007). Though his relationship with Eileen had never been completely harmonious, it deteriorated after his divorce from her mother. He later married a woman whom Eileen never took a liking to, and once, after she supposedly treated her stepmother with disrespect, he beat Eileen heartlessly and confined her to her room for six months. Even when she contracted dysentery, she was denied medical treatment and almost died (Louie, 2012). It was only with the help of her nurse that she was able to escape this incarceration and take shelter at her mother’s apartment (Fisher, 2015). She would tell and retell the story of this horrific ordeal in different stories, languages, and genres throughout her life. In 1939, Eileen began her studies in English literature at the University of Hong Kong with the intent to continue her studies at Oxford upon graduation. While in Hong Kong, she fine-tuned her English writing skills and met her life-long friend Fatima Mohideen (), but unfortunately, after only two years of study there, her plans for the future had to be abandoned. In December of 1941, World War II had officially broken out in the East and West, and with the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, the university was forced to close.

Chang was thus unable to complete her studies and returned to Shanghai in 1942 (Louie, 2012). Disappointed but not disheartened, Chang started churning out short stories, including her debut “Love in a Fallen City,” and sensational essays in Chinese and in English for Shanghai newspapers and literary magazines (Wang, 2010). These stories and essays, which were compiled into two collections, (Romances) and (Written on Water) in 1944 and 1945 respectively, arguably represent the best of Chang’s repertoire (Kingsbury, 2007). By the tender age of 23, she had become the “literary darling of 1940s Shanghai” (Fisher, 2015, para. 14). Like Hong Kong, Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese, but Chang stayed off the authorities’ radar by writing about painting, music, fashion, and literature rather than politics and war (McCormick, 2010). The Japanese viewed her work as unthreatening because of its non-political tone; her writing was criticized by others for its focus on so-called trivialities like romance. Yet, in 1943, with the publication of (“The Golden Cangue”), any doubts regarding her literary ability were dispelled and she was once and for all regarded by both loyal fans and former naysayers as an accomplished, talented writer (Thomas, 1995). During these first few years back in Shanghai, Chang met her first husband, Hu Lancheng (), a distinguished intellectual who worked in the Ministry of Information, a bureau of the Nanjing puppet government installed by the Japanese (Louie, 2012; Wang, 2010). Hu and Chang married in 1945, but theirs was not to be a marriage of enduring bliss. When the Japanese retreated and the puppet regime collapsed, Hu was branded a traitor. He fled into hiding and became involved with multiple women. When Chang discovered his infidelity, she was deeply aggrieved and the couple divorced just two years after they had first wed. For decades, Chang carried around feelings of betrayal from her relationship with Hu which finally were given voice in the 1978 story (“Lust, Caution”), published over 30 years after their split (Louie, 2012). Even though her career had blossomed under Japanese occupation, Chang and her writing were not welcome in China once Mao Zedong had seized power and proclaimed the People’s Republic. As a former wife of a Japanese collaborator, she was already at risk of being labeled a traitor, and her insistence on remaining apolitical in her writings pushed her even further into the spotlight. Her reflections on fashion and art were accused of being bourgeois, and Leftists questioned if her political reticence originated in secret nationalist sympathies (Louie, 2012; Fisher, 2015). Her background did not help matters either as she

came from an affluent, upper-class family; ironically, though, she was a struggling writer at that time (Kingsbury, 2007). Within just a few years, it became clear that Chang could not continue to live and work as a writer in Communist China, so in 1952, she fled to Hong Kong, where she worked as a translator and writer at the United States Information Service (Kingsbury, 2007). During her three-year stint there, she was commissioned to write two anti-Communist novels, The Rice Sprout Song and Naked Earth, which, upon their publication and despite their nuanced perspective, made it impossible for her to return to her beloved Shanghai (McCormick, 2010). Three years later, in 1955, Chang immigrated to the United States, where she met her second husband, Ferdinand Reyher, a minor American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist 30 years her senior (Louie, 2012). Together, they moved from one residence to another as Reyher’s health declined. Ten years after they married, Reyher suffered a series of strokes and passed away, at which point Chang began to recede into increasing seclusion (Yi, 2017). Although she lived in isolation, she held the post of writer-in-residence at different universities and finally landed a job as researcher at UC-Berkeley (Kingsbury, 2007). In her later years, she translated the famous Qing novel The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai (); revised earlier works, including her English version of which she extended into a full-length novel, The Rouge of the North; and wrote three semi- autobiographical novels, two in English and a much more provocative third in Chinese: The Fall of the Pagoda (), The Book of Change (), and (Little Reunions). All three remained unpublished until after her death and only appeared in 2009 and 2010, adding to an expanding library of Chang works for her devoted readers to enjoy. It is clear that Chang led an exceptional if solitary life. Abandoned by her mother, physically assaulted by her father, betrayed by her first husband, widowed by her second, and all the while surrounded by conflict between East and West, Japan and China, tradition and modernity, Communists and Nationalists, Chang remains unique among her contemporaries as she used her voice not to push any political agenda, but to tell personal stories of desire, misfortune, and betrayal experienced by ordinary humans, most especially young women (Louie, 2012). At the juxtaposition of these manifold cultural and political extremes, and having received a Western-style bilingual education in cosmopolitan Shanghai and later in the British colony of Hong Kong, Chang had an extraordinary talent for bridging cultures and

languages; thus, she and her stories are a suitable and interesting subject for translation research.

The Two Short Stories: “Deng” and “Guihua”

Much academic consideration has been given to Eileen Chang as author of ‘original’ writings and to the short stories and novels which she crafted in her native Chinese; yet, it is important to step back and take a more holistic view of her greater creative life and collected works. Born into a family heavily influenced by Chinese tradition but also well-versed in Western literature and art, Chang came of age in multicultural Shanghai, where she received a bilingual education, and later studied English literature in Hong Kong, which was at that time still a British colony. She then spent the better part of her adult life in the United States, seeking to fulfill her ‘American dream’ of establishing herself as an English-language writer in her new home country. It is thus not surprising that her literary output was not limited to a particular mode, genre, or language. She was prolific as both writer and translator, with an œuvre consisting of short stories, full-length novels, essays, and screenplays in Chinese and English. And it was her mastery of both languages, her ability to translate between the two, and her unique bicultural perspective which distinguished her among contemporary Chinese writers (Hoyan, 1996). In fact, “Chang’s literary achievements are in part a result [emphasis added] of her bilingualism—a fact often overlooked in criticism on her works” (Li, 2006, p. 99). Artistically active in Chinese and in English, she wrote alternately between the two and translated from one into the other and vice versa. In Mandarin, she produced several notable translations, including renderings of The Old Man and the Sea and The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai (); she also self-translated several of her own works into Chinese and/or English, depending on the language of origin. Her creative process, however, sometimes collapsed the distinctions between source and target text, author and translator, and even (re)writing and translating. In some cases, both versions of a text—one in Chinese and the other in English—were published as the original, and it remains unclear to this day which materialized first (Huang, 2015). Even in those cases in which it is possible to distinguish source from target, Chang’s “subjective initiative” is manifestly displayed in the marked discrepancies between her texts

(Meng & Li, 2017, p. 13), which vacillate between “faithfulness toward and betrayal of the source” (Li, 2006, p. 100). As self-translator, she exercised an “aesthetic freedom” not enjoyed by “any other translator, who would be bound by copyright and concerns of loyalty to the source texts” (Li, 2006, p. 99). And as author, she alone could deviate from her source in self-translation without fear of undermining the “authorial intention” (Li, 2006, p. 100). Her target texts, consequently, do not simply recreate their sources; rather, they reinterpret and reconstruct the stories and their contexts, “extending...sometimes even subverting, [the] earlier writings and highlighting and rearticulating key issues” (Li, 2006, p. 100). They serve to complement and supplement—but also challenge—their source texts. “Her self-translation both extricates meaning from, and adds value to, the source text, while the source text not only gives meaning to but also exposes the significance of her self- translation” (Li, 2006, p. 100-101). Interacting synergistically, these textual pairs assume greater significance together than either would in isolation. However, depending on the direction of translation, Chang reinterpreted her stories in different ways and to a different extent. In general, works that she originally wrote in English (and later rendered into Chinese) were subjected to fewer manipulations in self-translation than those first penned in her native tongue (Hoyan, 1996, p. 280). On the other hand, works that first appeared in Chinese were often vastly reconfigured by Chang in the process of English translation. One clear exception is “The Golden Cangue” () which retains the imagery and motifs of the Chinese original and enjoyed widespread attention from sinologists and literary minds across Asia and the West (Hoyan, 1996, p. 282). In comparison, neither of the English self-translated texts under analysis in the present thesis has garnered the same academic consideration or acclaim. As Hoyan notes, both “Little Finger Up” and “Shame, Amah!” “retain merely the basic plot outlines of their originals, but fail to communicate their deeper meanings and the narrative sophistication which the works possess in Chinese” (1996, p. 281). With such glaring discrepancies between source and target texts, it is thus imperative, before proceeding with any comparative linguistic analysis, to take into account the key changes which the self-translated works have undergone. For the sake of brevity, and because the idiosyncrasies of self-translation fall outside the scope of the present study, this section will not seek to determine whether Chang translated or, in fact, rewrote the Chinese source texts, as could be argued. Instead, this section will first introduce Chang’s approach to English self-translation and then present synopses of both stories along with discussions of significant revisions evident in their self-

translated versions in order to contextualize the main focus of this thesis: CSI analysis and translation.

Chang as self-translator: working from Chinese into English

For her Sinophone audience, Chang was content to write in an incisive yet voluminous style; however, when she translated her Chinese short stories into English, she opted to make numerous omissions, greatly reducing the length of the target texts. Having once remarked that her Chinese ‘short’ stories were in fact rather long, Chang may have feared that translated as such they would prove unappealing and unpalatable to an Anglophone readership (, 2010). She may also have wanted to minimize distractions from central themes or plotlines. Or, as Li (2006) suggests, the more elaborate narration of the Chinese texts may simply be explained by the author’s greater mastery of her mother tongue. Whatever the reason, Chang eliminated both subtle and significant details as well as whole passages and entire characters in self-translation, producing streamlined English versions of her original Chinese texts. In correspondence with Stephen Soong, the later co- inheritor of her estate, Chang acknowledged that “her simplicity of [English] diction...was to accommodate American readers” (Hoyan, 1996, p. 280-281). Throughout her bilingual writing and (self-)translation process, she appears to have been ever-conscious of the divergent linguistic but also cultural backgrounds of her target audiences. When writing for a Sinophone readership already familiar with Chinese society and traditional culture, she narrates her stories with “more subtlety and irony” (Li, 2006, p. 102). Yet, when translating those same texts into English for an audience less acquainted with her country of birth, she renders certain details explicit which were left implied in the source and modifies, elucidates, or simply omits certain others which may baffle or pose barriers to comprehension for the foreign reader. In particular, Chang appears to have carefully deliberated upon the significance of individual cultural references to the setting, narration, and characterization of their respective source texts. At times, “[w]hen she writes for an English-speaking audience, she consciously elaborates upon Chinese cultural elements in order to enable these readers to understand the cultural context” (Li, 2006, p. 101). On the other hand, she was also afraid that too many explanations of the Chinese cultural background would interfere with the English-language reading experience (, 1981). Accordingly, she often omits cultural references which are not essential to her texts, treating these lexical items one-by-one in ad hoc fashion.

In the following chapters, we will discuss the definition and rendering of such references, but we must first examine the primary sources—the Chinese stories “Deng” and “Guihua”—from which they are drawn. In order to appreciate Chang’s nuanced handling of culture-specific items, it is necessary to understand her more global approach to English self- translation. Therefore, this section will present synopses of both Chinese stories followed by notes on how Chang manipulated each text in self-translation, i.e. by renaming the stories and omitting, adding, and altering source-text material.

“Deng”

Synopsis and Critical Interpretation

As its original Chinese title suggests, “Deng” is a story of anticipation and restlessness—of waiting—in the most immediate sense but also on a personal and, more broadly speaking, societal level. Gathered in the waiting room of the Pang family’s traditional tuina massage clinic, a microcosm of Shanghai’s local Chinese community gives vent to their grief and anguish, discussing at intervals the inextricable hardships of their private lives. Among the females, the conversation revolves around husbands and metaphorical headaches. Mrs. Xi, in her early forties, yearns to be reunited with her estranged husband, but is embarrassed of the rumors spreading through the community that he has taken a new, likely younger, wife in the capital Chongqing. She is also quite self-conscious of her thinning hair, which has begun to fall out in clumps as a result of chronic anxiety. An even more faded beauty, the older and less worldly Mrs. Tong has already lost complete hope in the notion of marriage, and insists, “There’s nothing to be gained from it.”6 She’s merely waiting until her three grown daughters are married off so that she can leave her husband behind and repair to a nunnery in the hills. Even those women who don’t take the ‘stage’ to air their grievances are plunged in uncertainty and unease. The masseur’s wife Mrs. Pang stays in the clinic day after day from morning to night, vigilantly keeping guard over her husband who is increasingly sought after by powerful government officials. The Pangs’ daughter, Ah Fang, also remains in the clinic, albeit reluctantly, planted by the entranceway to collect money from patients. Her ticket out

6 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 51

would be to find a suitable match for marriage, but she is “trapped...doomed to spend her blooming years in wistful longing.”7 With respect to marriage, there is an overall sense of pent-up frustration yet external pressure to exercise continued self-restraint. To take Mrs. Tong for example, she is advised by multiple acquaintances to suppress her anger and “aggravation,” which is precisely the source of the physical pain for which she has come to Pang’s clinic to seek treatment.8 Excluded, or perhaps spared, from the disappointments of marriage due to her unattractive appearance, Mrs. Bao counsels Mrs. Tong to remain in her husband’s home. After all, Mrs. Tong’s in-laws have passed away and her children are grown; in Mrs. Bao’s opinion, she should simply ignore her debauched husband and keep to her own quarters. In agreement, Mrs. Xi recommends that Mrs. Tong visit a Christian church, claiming that “the ministers’ talk” will quickly alleviate her anger.9 Even though Mrs. Tong puts her faith instead in fortune-tellers and Buddhist monks, they incidentally offer similar advice. A monk at the Golden Light Temple in Suzhou has told her that, if she cannot hold her tongue and conceal her resentment in this life, she is destined to be even more unhappily married to her same husband in the next. For Shanghainese women, it seems that marriage alone has the power to provide security and happiness. By exploring this subject, Chang returns to one of the most prominent themes of her collected works. According to the Confucian doctrine of the “Three Obediences” (), a woman must not assert independence or authority—she must obey the patriarch of her household, whether that be her father, husband, or son (Li, 2006, p. 104). And even though, based on the “Seven Out Rules” (), women could traditionally be evicted from their homes for adultery, men were entitled by related rules to take several wives (Li, 2006, p. 104). As such, matrimony was not a symbol of romantic love, but rather the product of careful negotiations and arrangements on behalf of two families or clans. Through her writing, Chang condemned this traditional model of marriage and further underscored the inequalities faced by women in patriarchal society. Not only are the female characters in “Deng” evaluated by men and women in terms of their physical appearance, but

7 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 43 8 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 50 9 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 52

as wives and mothers, they are obliged to endure infidelity and long hours of toil, bearing and raising children, cooking and cleaning, and attending to the needs of their husbands’ parents. Aside from marriage, there is yet another, much vaguer, source of concern and disquiet in the background, outside the insulating walls of the clinic: the Second World War. Situated on the fringe of its Asian theater, the characters are caught in a paradigmatic struggle between East and West, domestic and foreign powers, as well as traditional values and modern ideas. Life in Shanghai continues on relatively as it always has, but city residents still feel the effects and see the reminders of the war being waged around them. Inflation has risen, the prices of goods have skyrocketed, residential windows are crisscrossed with tape in case of air raids, and documentaries portraying the savagery of modern combat play at local theaters. Without an end in sight, the community is anxiously waiting for peace. According to Hoyan (1996), “Deng” evokes “a sense of resignation” (p. 282). Meng and Li (2017) concur, adding that the women in wartime Shanghai are ‘occupied’ with “endless, timeless and hopeless waiting” (p. 10). Inured to double doses of heartache and frustration, in their interpretation, Pang’s patients have “lost their spiritual strength” and become resigned to the unpleasantness of their existences (Meng & Li, 2017, p. 10). However, Gao (, 2010) contends that these women have not given up. As they wait for an end to aches and pains, marital discord, and armed conflict, they are consumed by anger and unrest. They continue to silently wait, but only because that is all they have in their power to do. In Gao’s reading, Chang has woven a story of the human condition, of our communal helplessness against the things in life which are beyond our control. To support this idea, he points out that there is no single female protagonist and each woman has her own troubles to contend with and burden to bear. The result is that, in having the characters share the spotlight, Chang has captured a snapshot, not of one individual or event of particular interest, but rather of the zeitgeist of wartime Shanghai. As a resident of the occupied area herself, Chang likely experienced the same emotions as the characters she portrays with biting sarcasm and at the same time sympathy: irritation, grief, impatience, and anxiety. It was a complicated time, but “Deng” offers readers a small retrospective window into that historical moment and a vivid portrait of Chang’s then state of mind.

Chang’s Self-Translation “Little Finger Up”—a Double Renaming

In 1961, Lucian Wu’s New Chinese Stories presented Chang’s English self-translation of the short story “Deng” under a new title, “Little Finger Up.” This represented a significant departure from the source text, of which the title translates to “Waiting” and offers a vague idea of the political, military, and emotional situation on the ground in occupied Shanghai. While the original title is admittedly somewhat indirect or obscure, that of Chang’s self-translation is downright puzzling, its connotative significance likely not grasped by the average Anglophone. Aware of the target reader’s cultural background, Wu or possibly Chang herself foresaw the potential loss in translation posed by this Chinese culture-bound concept and added a footnote to clarify: “Holding up the little finger is a gesture commonly understood to refer to a concubine.”10 In other words, Chang replaced a simple, mundane verb—to wait— with a culturally-loaded notion, a gesture perhaps only recognized within her native Chinese society. This new title is accompanied by an addition to the target text, a short exchange between the masseur’s daughter and an anonymous patient:

After [Mr. Kao and his concubine] were gone, a lady asked carefully, “Was that Mrs. Kao?” Ah Mei held up a little finger significantly. “I thought so,” said the lady. “I certainly hope that the real Mrs. Kao wouldn’t act so cheap.” 11

Certain ladies in the waiting room clearly look on the practice of concubinage with strong distaste, and bear resentment towards the women involved. Their displeasure at the sight of Gao’s concubine, according to Meng and Li (2017), mirrors Chang’s own aversion to the practice itself. Moreover, these scholars argue that, by eliminating the ambiguity of the story’s original title, Chang is alerting her readers to the main theme of this work: the broken system of traditional Chinese marriage and the resulting misfortune of women, be they spinsters, widows, concubines, or fully-fledged wives. On the story’s title page in Wu’s 1961 text, the new English title “Little Finger Up” appears printed above an ink drawing of a man and woman walking arm in arm, backs turned to the onlooker, and a vertical subtitle in Chinese reading “Fuzheng”, a term which

10 “Little Finger Up,” p. 65 11 “Little Finger Up,” p. 70

refers to a concubine rising to the full formal status of wife. In Gao’s (, 2010) assessment, this double titular revision confirms his hypothesis that, in revisiting her source text, Chang deliberately narrowed the focus and scope of the story to its central theme of marriage. He argues that, whereas the Chinese original portrays the diverse, wide-ranging experiences of an entire community in the face of national crisis, Chang’s self-translation concentrates primarily on the ills of traditional marriage and the pressure it places on women. In fact, the female members of the cast effectively represent a spectrum of women across a lifetime, each of whom is currently experiencing the marriage-related troubles which correspond to her given age bracket. For example, the young thirty-something concubine works tirelessly to look after her ‘spouse’ Mr. Gao, while Mrs. Xi, in her early forties, frets that her husband far away in the capital has strayed. As the eldest in the waiting room, middle-aged Mrs. Tong has abandoned hope for anything resembling marital bliss or contentment, but Ah Fang, still a young woman, is frustrated and distressed by her failure to attract a suitor and entertains hopes that she will one day enter into a marriage and thus extricate herself from her large family. To further substantiate his hypothesis that the self-translation zooms in on the question of marriage, Gao (, 2010) notes the multiple characters who are not preserved in the target text, i.e. the maid (), the little boy who accompanies her, and arguably Pang’s last patient, the young aristocrat (). Interestingly, none of these characters are directly associated with the theme of marriage. Their back stories each introduce other themes and motifs to the original story, such as class divisions and the ongoing war; thus, their absence from the target text can be viewed as contributing to a condensation, or distillation, of the source. In addition to retitling the story, Chang also renamed the majority of its characters. She was well-known for her penchant for Chinese puns and double entendres, often formulating titles and character names with allusions to plot twists or personality traits (Li, 2006). And among the characters in “Little Finger Up,” there are several which have been given such ‘telling’ names. For example, Mr. Gao (), who apart from yelps of massage-induced pain does not speak to a soul, not even to return Mrs. Pang’s greeting, and whose petite concubine scurries around attending to his every need—buttoning up his gown, fetching his hat and cane, and even testing the temperature of his tea—naturally evokes an association to the expression (“aloof and remote”) (, 2010). Similarly, Mrs.

Tong (), whose married name signifies “child” is indeed portrayed as child-like in appearance:

Mrs. Tong stood there in her underclothing, a lightly padded black linen jacket with matching pants. Her short, pot-bellied figure and full face, daubed with red and white makeup, made her look like an old-time Chinese boy, like the ones in those paintings on the theme ‘A Hundred Sons’.12

In particular, the masseur’s name is laden with cultural significance. A fitting moniker for a medical professional, Pang Songling () brings to mind health and long life, with “ling” making reference to one’s age and “song” denoting a pine tree (, 2010). According to traditional Chinese culture, these conifers symbolize resilience and longevity because they are able to withstand extreme cold, heat, and drought, remaining persistently green under both favorable and adverse weather conditions (“What are we talking about when we talk about plants in classical Chinese gardens?”). Lastly, Mrs. Xi’s name () can also be considered descriptive in nature. Her husband has taken a position in Chongqing and left her isolated and near penniless in Shanghai. As a result, her social status has suffered and formerly friendly acquaintances have begun to treat her coldly and with ridicule, or as it is expressed in Chinese “xi-luo” (, 2010). Unfortunately, Chang was unable to replicate these feats of word-play in her English self-translation. All the same, she still gave her characters new names for Romanization. Pang Songling () becomes Peng Yu-fung; his daughter Ah Fang () is rechristened as Ah Mei; Mrs. Wang () now answers to “Mrs. Li”; and Mrs. Tong () has taken the married-name “Ho” which carries regrettable target-language connotations. As mentioned earlier, several characters did not survive Chang’s editorial cuts in the process of self-translation, but there are also two minor characters, Mrs. Xi () and Mrs. Bao ( ), who are fused into a less minor role portrayed by a “Mrs. Yu.” The justification for such textual alterations is not immediately clear; yet, there is one other change in name for which there exists a plausible explanation. Mr. Pang speaks complimentarily to Mr. Gao of a certain Mr. Zhu (), a government official to whom he pays a daily house-call and whom he commends for his healthy lifestyle and erudition. In

12 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 55

Chang’s self-translation, this figure is referred to using a slightly different surname, “Chou,” which likely corresponds to the Chinese “Chou” or “Zhou” (). The target text also adds, “Mr. Chou was, as everybody knew, an important personage in the puppet government.” 13 With this supporting detail, it seems likely that Chang was alluding, as she also had in “Lust, Caution,” to the contemporary politician Zhou Fohai () who served as second-in- command of the Executive Yuan within Wang Jingwei’s collaborationist government. Perhaps, in Chinese, directly mentioning a man in power by name would seem inappropriate or inadvisable; however, Chang was not subject to the same constraints in English self-translation, especially more than a decade later. Furthermore, since Anglophone readers are not as familiar with Chinese politics, explicit mention of “Mr. Chou” and his role in the “puppet government” may have helped to clarify the historical context of the story and frame Chang’s personal experience through the lens of her target readership’s perspective.

“Little Finger Up”—Omissions and Additions

In terms of raw textual content, there are substantial discrepancies between “Deng” and its self-translation “Little Finger Up,” which when studied macroscopically appear to reveal several tendencies of Chang’s English self-translation practice. Although some source text content has experienced subtle alteration, most discrepancies between source and target text arise from wholesale material omissions and additions. As previously noted, Chang seems to whittle the text down into a target-language story which primarily explores the tragedy, as she considers it, of Chinese marriage. Secondary characters with no relevance to the dominant theme, such as the maid and the little boy who sits “on her lap like a sickly lump of lard” are eliminated, while others are portrayed in much less detail.14 For example, Mrs. Wang debatably survives in the persona of Mrs. Li, but Chang strips her of all characterization—including her smile which radiates “the dim, dark peace of the alleyways” 15— turning her into a faceless, featureless, forgettable shell of the woman she embodies in the source text. Also gutted in self-translation are several memorable descriptive passages. In the Chinese original text, much attention is given to Mrs. Tong (), whose pitiful circumstances and status as a loyal and dutiful yet wholly unappreciated wife are colorfully

13 “Little Finger Up,” p. 67 14 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 41 15 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 48

sketched out in a succession of poignant figurative portraits. Readers of “Little Finger Up,” however, are not granted the same access into the (renamed) Mrs. Ho’s joyless daily life. We are not given to visualize her cooking and cleaning for hours each day, only to have the meals she labored to prepare devoured by her husband and his concubine(s) before she can even take her seat at the dining table. We do not see how the years of monotonous domestic toil have left her weak and empty, her life devoid of meaning:

Those old folks, the ones who’d been so hard on her, and whom she had finally vanquished, they were now long dead; and still she rose every morning before dawn, rustling about in rooms that were like the inside of a dark red bucket: scritchy-scratch, running her hands over long-familiar surfaces, everything the same, except for the sharp, cold ache in her knuckles. 16

Nor are target readers led to observe the present historical moment from Mrs. Ho’s point of view. Hailing from a more rural area, she has watched over the greater part of a century as Shanghai and its environs has developed into an ever more Westernized, modern metropolis, but she still remembers the bucolic ‘China’ of her youth.

In the inner room, a wall-clock ticked away, counting minutes and seconds with punctilious care, cutting time into tiny little squares for the civilized world. But far in the distance one could hear the noontime cockcrow, just a faint note or two, as if the land stretched out, uninhabited, for miles and miles.17

Omissions such as these affect the layering and depth of the story, rendering the target text much flatter than the source and its characters less engaging for the target reader. Such passages may have been excluded out of concern for cohesion and economy, but there are other omissions which point to concern of a different sort. Around 1960, when Chang first crafted her self-translation, baby-boomers in the United States were still young children and the war was fresh in the country’s memory. Motivated to be accepted as a legitimate—and published—English-language writer, it seems quite reasonable that Chang would wish to

16 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 52 17 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 52-53

refrain from offending her target audience by writing on a sensitive subject like the Second World War, even or perhaps especially from a Chinese perspective. Accordingly, multiple minor mentions of the war are excluded. For example, the ladies seated in the clinic’s waiting room do not commiserate over the rise in the prices of goods, which have rendered winter clothes such as wool coats prohibitively expensive for the middle class. There is also less of a sense that the anxiety experienced by these women is to a substantial degree caused by the fraught political and military situation—their worries seem to stem exclusively from problems in their home lives. Even subtle aspects of the setting that draw attention to the war outside are omitted in self-translation: “The clinic window was closed, and the window-panes covered with criss-cross strips of yellowing newspaper that had been pasted up in case of air attack, and were now peeling off.”18 One particularly notable deletion is that of a passage concerning a “war documentary” which portrays real-life combat and death:

The client seemed to be a young man of the gentry class. He had a deerskin overcoat and talked with Mr. Pang about the war documentary that was being shown at the Russian Club. ‘It’s really frightful. You see the shrapnel flying by, and a soldier falls backward, his face twisted up in pain, and then he clutches at his chest and dies. And so many, many!...So many dead—mountains of them,’ the young man said.19

The speaker, an otherwise nondescript character, may not have been entirely eliminated from the cast of the target text, but his recommendation for the Pangs to go see that film certainly is. But even more importantly, so is Mr. Peng’s joking response, “It had better be good,”20 which he offers with a smile, and his wife’s quip, “It had better show lots of other people dying.”21 Shockingly jocular, the couple’s reaction to the news of the sobering war film seems inappropriate and could very well upset or alienate patriotic American target readers, not to mention cast the Chinese in a negative, callous, and unfeeling light. Although Chang appears to deliberately dilute the story’s wartime atmosphere, she still adds certain clarifying details to elucidate the contemporary Chinese political situation

18 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 56 19 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 56 20 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 56 21 “In the Waiting Room,” p. 56

for her target readership. Apart from explicitly noting the puppet government within which Mr. Chou (Zhu) figures prominently, she also emphasizes over and over that Shanghai is under Japanese occupation and its residents are suffering as a result. When Mr. Peng regales Mr. Gao with his monologue regarding the plight of defenseless pedicab drivers, he begins by discussing “the deplorable conditions in Japanese-held Shanghai” and says, “It’s awful nowadays!”22 For Sinophone readers, especially those in Shanghai who first read “Deng” in the winter of 1944 when the story was first published, such clarifications would likely seem redundant and unnecessary; yet, for Anglophone readers who draw on a separate cultural background and history, these details can prove helpful in contextualizing the setting of the story and evoking the strong sense of uncertainty and frustration which residents of Shanghai experienced during occupation and the antipathy which lingers to this day. Lastly, Chang’s self-translation seems to present males in a less than favorable light. Not only do men take their loyal, hard-working wives for granted, preferring to canoodle with concubines and ‘sing-song girls’ instead, but in “Little Finger Up” they also involve themselves in much more licentious behavior. As Mr. Peng glowingly recounts the details of the powerful Mr. Chou’s healthy, disciplined lifestyle to his patient Mr. Gao, the latter listens, ironically musing to himself that “[i]t was common knowledge that Mr. Chou smoked opium.”23 Yet, Gao himself seems to have picked up the habit as well, by the look of his “waxy pallor and curiously blank eyes.”24 In a similar vein, Chang’s self-translation elaborates significantly upon the trouble which Mr. Ho (Tong) got himself into and for which he was detained in jail () indefinitely until his wife could secure his release, without a speck of gratitude on his part to say the least. Whereas the Chinese original text offers no hint of the circumstances which led to his arrest, readers of the English self-translation learn, “Mr. Ho had become involved in a shady business deal and, what was more important, he had overlooked somebody in bribing the authorities.”25 With such striking patterns evident in the edits, it seems reasonable to conclude that Chang sought to simplify and clarify the story for Anglophone readers and, at the same time, avoid sensitive subjects, such as war, which could alienate or upset the target audience. And

22 “Little Finger Up,” p. 66 23 “Little Finger Up,” p. 68-69 24 “Little Finger Up,” p. 69 25 “Little Finger Up,” p. 75

men were portrayed as uncaring and morally bankrupt in order to emphasize the suffering of their wives and daughters.

“Guihua”

Synopsis

On one hot, hazy, and humid Saturday morning, Ah Xiao26 and her son Baishun climb up to her employer Mr. Garter’s apartment, high above the city of Shanghai. As the sun makes its cloud-obscured ascent, Ah Xiao greets the neighbor’s maid and enters her place of work. She ties on her neat white apron and begins her daily chores. She prepares breakfast, sends her son off to school, sends her master off to work, fields phone calls from his various playthings, and goes to market. In the mid-morning, Ah Xiao’s younger friend Xiuqin arrives. She is similarly employed as an amah by “the blonde” and has come to return tableware on behalf of her mistress. While Ah Xiao scrubs Garter’s laundry in the bathtub, the two women gossip about the lives of their employers. They agree that even though their employers appear well-to-do, they are as stingy as they come. As the heat and endless labor begin to overwhelm Ah Xiao, the conversation turns personal. Xiuqin is anxious about her impending wedding, in preparation for which her mother has come to the city to buy traditional wedding gifts and to escort her back to their home village. Xiuqin is concerned about her soon-to-be husband, a man who she has never met but has heard has a penchant for gambling and whose home has only an earthen floor. She is anxious about leaving the modern and fashionable amenities of city life and returning to the countryside, and insists that the man’s family give her a gold ring. Xiuqin’s words hit a nerve with Ah Xiao, who feels shame for “living in sin” with her own “husband,” whom she has never formally married. Due to this sense of shame, she interprets Xiuqin’s voicing of these legitimate anxieties as being smug and insensitive. Panting, perspiring, reeking of body odor, and overcome by strong emotions and the stifling heat, Ah Xiao becomes utterly dazed. She withdraws to the front balcony, bathed in the midday sun, and hangs the laundry to dry. Baishun, her son, has already returned from school, but he does not dare ring the doorbell. Instead, he waits down below at the back

26 Unless stated otherwise, names are romanized as they appear in Patton’s and Chang’s respective translations.

entrance to the building, beating on the wooden fencing and wailing to get Ah Xiao’s attention. Baishun’s reappearance coincides with the arrival of two other guests, an elderly woman from Ah Xiao’s hometown and a “Sister” who earns a living by transporting rice and washing laundry downstairs. The three friends crowd into the cramped kitchen and merrily engage in chit-chat with Ah Xiao as they eat a simple lunch. The elderly woman is curious about dowry arrangements for Xiuqin’s upcoming nuptials, but Ah Xiao is relieved when the topic turns to the wealthy newlyweds upstairs, a discussion she can readily lead, as the focus of attention shifts away from her friend, who will soon be a newlywed herself. In the meantime, Baishun sits on a stool nearby, picking at his food and reviewing lessons in his schoolbook so that he will be permitted playtime in the afternoon. At different points in the women’s conversation, Baishun chirps in, but each time he is met with explosive rebukes from his mother, who stabs at him with her chopsticks and slaps him. She is very unhappy that he had to repeat a grade in school and feels strained by the ever-increasing tuition fees for which she alone contributes. The elderly woman finally speaks up for Baishun and persuades Ah Xiao that he has been disciplined enough for one meal, but the mood does not improve until Ah Xiao’s husband arrives. As he walks in the door, all tension seems to quickly fade away. Ah Xiao’s friends, aware that the couple live separately and do not have many chances to enjoy each other’s company, discreetly take their leave. Ah Xiao is giddy at the sight of her husband. Using her master’s tea leaves, she prepares him a fresh cup of tea and does the ironing while she tells him about her day. She remembers the letter which she recently received from her mother and asks him to read it aloud to her, making excuses since she is self-conscious about being illiterate. As usual, her mother makes no mention of the man or their child, and this echoes the feelings of estrangement between the couple; however, a cheerful atmosphere is restored once Ah Xiao marvels at the handicrafts which he as a tailor has made and brought to show her. As the blazing afternoon sun continues to shine into the kitchen, Ah Xiao finishes her ironing. She then whips up fresh, steaming pancakes for everyone while her husband tells stories of strange sea creatures. Even though Baishun quickly loses interest, Ah Xiao hangs onto every word. This sweet family moment of pancakes and stories is decisively cut short when Garter returns home. Ah Xiao’s husband retreats to the rear balcony, while Ah Xiao runs around in circles trying to attend to all of Garter’s demands. When her husband comes up behind her and whispers that he will come to see her that night, she acquiesces in spite of exhaustion.

Ah Xiao then goes downstairs to fetch water for Garter’s bath. When she returns, her husband is gone, but there’s no rest to be had because a new woman soon appears. She looks like a dancehall girl, with her overpermed hair and an odd pelt-like wrap around her neck. Ah Xiao fixes drinks and a light apéritif just before another woman, the persistent Miss Li, phones for the third time that day. Garter reluctantly takes the call but is pleased to set a date with her for the following week. Meanwhile, Ah Xiao goes out onto the balcony and enjoys a short respite from her duties in the cool twilight. She then returns to the kitchen and prepares dinner for Garter and his young date, generously taking flour from her personal ration to prepare pancakes for dessert. After taking care of the master’s evening meal, Ah Xiao makes a vegetable stew for herself and Baishun. She must wait until Garter and his date leave to go into his bedroom and make the bed so that it will be waiting fresh and clean for them when they return. Hours go by, Baishun dozes off, and Ah Xiao’s patience begins to wane. Finally, at ten o’clock, her husband calls to check on her and says that he has been waiting for her. This prompts Ah Xiao to venture out into Garter’s quarters to see if the pair are really still in the apartment. To Ah Xiao’s exasperation, they are not. They had slipped out without a word. Ah Xiao, however, swallows her anger and makes the bed. She then grabs her belongings, drops Baishun off with the neighbor-amah for the night, and heads out into the pouring rain. She doesn’t get very far, though, because the streetlights are out, the roads are full of holes, and a thunderstorm is ravaging the city. Weary and frightened, Ah Xiao decides to turn back. She trudges up the stairs to Garter’s apartment, but is even more frightened to be alone, so she returns to the neighbor’s house and retrieves Baishun. She throws newspapers on the kitchen table to improvise a bed for herself and her son and the two cuddle up underneath a quilt. Baishun sleeps through the storm, but Ah Xiao is kept awake by unhappy thoughts and loud noises emanating from the apartment above, where the newlywed couple are arguing. Around midnight, Garter returns with his date. He turns on the kitchen light and finds Ah Xiao, pretending to be asleep, and Baishun snuggled up on the table. When he sees her in that worn-out, unwashed, unkempt, and half-undressed state, he feels satisfied that he had never debased himself and pursued anything more than a professional relationship with her. He turns out the light and Ah Xiao falls asleep to the sounds of youngsters carousing in the streets and a peddler hawking food in the wee hours of the morning. Early the next, the storm has blown over, as has the argument of the couple upstairs. The air is much cooler, and trees have lost their leaves. Ah Xiao peers down at the balcony

below and sees that the floor is still littered with peanut and water-chestnut shells, but she is unconcerned because it is no longer any of “her business.”

Interpretation of “Guihua”

This story has elicited widely divergent responses and interpretations. Taiwanese scholar Shui Jing (1996), speaking from a comparative literature background, sees an allegorical tale of immorality and lust set against a backdrop of metaphoric filth and stifling heat. As the day unfolds, emotions surge as the temperature rises, with Ah Xiao cyclically emerging from and falling back into a sweaty stupor. At the end of the day, once pressure has reached boiling point, the cosmopolitan port city of Shanghai, a mecca of unscrupulous indulgence, meets the wrath of the heavens, much like the God-forsaken city of Sodom in the Old Testament. Fortunately for the Chinese city’s inhabitants, however, divine retribution in their case does not spell the annihilation of their beloved city, but rather a short-lived if unsettling thunderstorm. Hong Kong academic Carole H. F. Hoyan (1996), also interpreting the story from a literary perspective, writes of Chang’s empathy for her “pitiful characters...[and] the convoluted paths of their psychology” (p. 128). She rejects binary interpretations which frame Ah Xiao as an innocent woman from the countryside against Garter, a morally repugnant man of the metropolis. She instead asserts that Chang has foregrounded “spark[s] of kindness and sympathetic understanding in ordinary people” (p. 130). In her eyes, the story offers a compassionate take on the weakness and suffering of human beings, “the inescapable pettiness and sadness of human endeavors” (p. 135). She claims that “[i]nstead of didactic moralizing, [Chang] aims at laying bare the terrifying truth of life and the inherent tragedy of human existence” (p. 127). To substantiate this idea, Hoyan quotes Chang herself:

As a story writer, I believe that my job is to understand the complexity of life. Even if I hate...[those about whom I wrote] at the beginning, I am only left with a kind of sad compassion, after I come to understand them...I can forgive their failings and sometimes even love them, because they exist and they are real.27

27 Hoyan, 1996, p. 127

Whereas Hoyan argues that the work communicates no political message, veiled or otherwise, there are those who disagree. Chinese and Malaysian co-authors Qiao Meng and Noritah Omar (2012) cheer Chang’s “sharp critique of colonialism,” insisting that the author, criticized harshly by contemporaries for remaining apolitical, did at least express political views through this one work (p. 565). Meng and Omar point out that, while most of the author’s writings only feature “the colonisers” as minor background characters, “Guihua” presents a “direct confrontation” between the colonized and the colonizer (p. 565). In their opinion, Chang was not, as critics contended, simply waxing poetic about the mundane lives of ordinary Chinese; she was crafting a shrewd denunciation of imperialism, turning conventional Orientalist views on their head and reversing the power dynamics between invading imperial powers and local residents. By mocking Garter and putting him, the master, under the gaze of Ah Xiao the servant, Chang, in their view, seeks to extinguish the colonizers’ sense of moral superiority. Even though there is no consensus regarding the author’s intentions for the story, the above-mentioned scholars all hold favorable views of the protagonist Ah Xiao. Shui Jing (1996) considers her to be a strong woman—vivacious, capable, thoughtful, and kind. In somewhat hyperbolic language, he likens her to the Chinese historical figure Zhuge Liang, famed for his wisdom and resourcefulness; to an FBI informant, for her fine-tuned skills of observation; and to the Earth Mother, in consideration of her maternal nature. In Shui Jing’s opinion, Ah Xiao has even evolved into a kind of fairy godmother for Garter, whom she cares for like an adopted son. Hoyan (1996) perhaps sees Ah Xiao’s character in a more nuanced light. She is not perfect, but deep down she is kind and nurturing. This scholar pays special attention to the moment of vulnerability and illumination which Ah Xiao experiences during the storm. Soaking wet, frightened, and alone, she momentarily comes face to face with her truth, with the sadness of her existence. According to Hoyan, this is the impression of Ah Xiao which readers are left with: a flawed but inherently good person wading through the trials of life. From a post-colonial frame of reference, Meng and Omar (2012) view Ah Xiao as an honest, affectionate soul with deep feelings and an independent mind. She may be naïve, but her good sense and wisdom more than compensate. Strong and self-reliant, she challenges the hackneyed stereotype of Asian women as silent and submissive. In fact, it is not she, but a Caucasian woman, who is portrayed as shackled by silence under the male (colonizer’s) gaze:

Leaning in the darkness was a naked beauty of astonishing proportions with red hair and fair skin....She tilted herself to highlight her large, turned-up breasts, her exaggeratedly slim waist and her tapering thighs....She had the face of a child, squat and square, and large brown eyes indicating neither pleasure nor voluptuousness that gazed out blankly at her viewers beyond the frame.28

Meng and Omar argue that Chang presents this beauty of “astonishing proportions” in a manner reminiscent of the way nineteenth-century Europeans exhibited the black African Saartjie Baartman, or “the Hottentot Venus” as she was then billed for her large buttocks. This detail, in their assessment, liberates the colonized woman from the colonizer’s gaze and substitutes a colonizing woman in her place. Unlike Ah Xiao, Garter is unanimously considered to be a shameless, self-centered reprobate. Although stingy and promiscuous, he manages to maintain a number of girlfriends with his superficial charm and good looks. Shui Jing compares him to the Chinese Casanova, Ximen Qing, whose sexual exploits are recounted in the sixteenth-century classic Jin Ping Mei. While this Taiwanese scholar portrays Garter as a virile quasi-gigolo, Meng and Omar assert that Chang deliberately emasculates him. He as “master,” in their opinion, represents the entire colonizer class and his “lack of moral fibre can be seen as a mockery of [their] arrogance...[and] self-expressed moral superiority” (p. 566). Whether they view the story as castrating the colonial impulse, proffering a moral message, or providing an empathetic vision, these scholars all agree that “Guihua” is a piece which embodies the literary talent and wit of Eileen Chang.

Chang’s Self-Translation “Shame, Amah!”—Another Renaming

Of all the revisions to the story, perhaps the most conspicuous is the change in title. While Patton’s title “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn” may appear long-winded, it conveys the meaning and imagery of the source text. Chang’s self-translation “Shame, Amah!,” on the other hand, has been subject to a renaming, adopting for its title one of Garter’s lines from the story. This reflects a shift in representation, as the given name of the protagonist is replaced by her occupational title, but also, more importantly, a loss of culture-bound and metaphorical language.

28 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 70

Known as guihua in Mandarin, sweet osmanthus flowers have long been treasured by the Chinese for their pleasant aroma and confectionary appeal (Sun, 2013). Since they bloom in the fall, several different guihua-infused treats are prepared in celebration of the Mid- Autumn Festival, such as guihua-flavored rice cakes, dessert soups, and rice wine. Therefore, the mentioning of guihua in the source text title functions as an allusion to the season of autumn and to the important holiday in traditional Chinese culture. In the only footnote found within Patton’s translation, his editor Eva Hung discusses the connotations of the source text title: “The fragrance of the [sweet] osmanthus flower is synonymous with autumn. ‘Steamed’ refers both to the heat and the humidity of an oppressive Indian summer. The title is also a metaphor for the heroine who is past her prime (p. 59).” These multiple intertwined layers of figurative and literal meaning—suggesting autumn, heat, humidity, and middle age—are not communicated by the title of the English self-translation. Instead, the new title borrows a Chinese word “amah,” which in this case is a form of address for housekeepers, and likely leaves no impression other than its foreignness on target readers unacquainted with the Chinese language. Thus, the only clue that they can glean from the title is that of shame, or contempt. Of course, if confronted with Patton’s title, it is very possible that Anglophone readers at first glance would not appreciate the cultural significance of the osmanthus flower. But the editor’s note at the bottom of the page will serve as an illuminating supplement for those interested in learning more. Regardless, from Patton’s literal rendering of the source text title, readers may at least discern that the story will feature a character named Ah Xiao who is in the midst of a trying time. Meng and Omar (2012) fiercely criticize Chang’s choice to change the title but acknowledge that she attempts to hold onto her Chinese cultural roots while translating for a target audience. The idea of a melancholy autumn, as they observe, is a common Chinese literary trope, and thus the source text title is inherently cultural. As a result, in their eyes, the renaming of the story can be considered to reveal the essential conundrum which they see Chang facing in self-translation: should she adapt to the target culture or assert her own native roots (p. 569)? In this case, it appears she has chosen to adapt. In addition to renaming the story, Chang also renames her characters. In the source text, Ah Xiao () works for a Mr. Garter () and has a son named Baishun () as well as a friend named Xiuqin (). In the self-translation, however, Ah Nee works for Mr. Schacht and has a son named Shin Fa and a friend named Ning Mei.

It is unclear exactly why Chang made these changes, but she may have been influenced by a desire to accommodate Anglophone readers unfamiliar with Chinese phonetics or romanization systems. For example, “xiao,” “xiu,” and “qin” would be especially difficult to pronounce since few words in English begin with ‘x,’ let alone ‘xi’ or the letter ‘q’ not followed by a ‘u.’ In contrast, “Nee,” “Ning,” and “Mei” are much more straightforward. As an anecdote, a former classmate of mine, whose surname was Pai (), which is now usually rendered as “Bai” and pronounced like the English word “pie,” once complained that Americans often mispronounce her name, addressing her as “Ms. Pay.” Chang may therefore have instinctively known that “Baishun” would prove phonetically problematic for English-language readers and thus have instead opted for “Shin Fa.” Although pronunciation was likely a determining factor in Chang’s decision to give her characters new names, the replacement of “Schacht” for “Garter” suggests a different sort of cultural adaptation. When the Chinese short story was first published in 1944, Shanghai had already witnessed a historical upheaval. The Japanese had forcibly taken possession of the city and dissolved the international settlements; a civil war had erupted between Chinese Nationalists and Communists; and expatriates were taking to their heels and fleeing the country (“A Short history of Shanghai”). Those who remained were rounded up and detained by the Japanese after their attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. For this reason, it can be inferred that “Guihua” is set sometime prior to that date, likely just several months earlier. Otherwise, Garter would not be living a life of indulgence high above the city; instead, he would be interned in a work camp alongside his foreign compatriots (, 1996). With this setting in mind, it seems more than plausible that a character with the family name “Garter” would reside in Shanghai’s international settlement and be of either American or British extraction. For translation into English, if ease of pronunciation were the only factor to consider, a name change would appear unnecessary. Once acquainted with Garter’s unsavory character, however, the implicit connotation suggested by this surname—that of the women’s undergarment—becomes crystal clear and a change in nationality seems commercially prudent. Chang was possibly wary of alienating target readers and thus sought to draw a distinction between the stingy, insensitive womanizer and her prospective, also Western, readership. Although the Chinese work first appeared in 1944, the self-translation didn’t materialize until roughly two decades later, in 1962. By that time, the Second World War had

passed and Chang had resettled in the United States. The U.S. was leading the Western Bloc against the Cold War threat from the East. The country was locked in diametric opposition to the Soviets, who had taken East Germany and others as satellite states, and was swept up in an anti-communist hysteria. Across the nation, there was also a strong residual antipathy towards the Japanese and Germans leftover from the Second World War. In such a politically charged climate, it would appear strategic and opportune for Chang to replace the characteristically English surname “Garter” with a distinctly German name “Schacht,” which conveniently creates a related connotation towards the phallic. This theory is further supported by another revision to the text. In the original story, Garter is portrayed as somewhat ungracious towards the Chinese and even racist. Ah Xiao grumbles, “He says: ‘Shanghai’s a terrible place! Even the Chinese servants cheat foreigners!’ But if he wasn’t in Shanghai, he would have been killed off long ago in the foreigners’ own war.”29 In the self-translation, Chang moderates the anti-Chinese rhetoric and specifies Schacht’s nationality, which up until this point has only been implied. Ah Nee complains that Schacht says, “‘In Shanghai even the servants take advantage of foreigners,’” but then she points out, ironically: “If he’s not in Shanghai, the Germans in Germany have to go to war, he’d be dead long ago.”30

“Shame, Amah!”—Omissions, Additions, and Alterations

Omissions Although the renaming of the short story and its characters may exert a subtle influence on its reception, there are other critical revisions which further distinguish the self- translation from the source text. Structurally speaking, the source text consists of 70 paragraphs following a short epigraph that is a quote from Chang’s lifelong friend Fatima Mohideen. Whereas “Steamed” only slightly alters the indentation structure and runs 33 pages long, “Shame” contains more than twice as many paragraphs, yet is surprisingly less than half as long. Of the Chinese source text’s 70 paragraphs, only 20 remain relatively unaltered in Chang’s self-translation. While significant details, such as all mention of the newlyweds upstairs and the “young master” downstairs, have been excluded from a total of 29 paragraphs, a full 14 paragraphs have been wholly eliminated. The content of the remaining

29 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 72 30 “Shame, Amah!,” p. 9

seven paragraphs has experienced critical modification, such as in the addition of a second “husband” for Ah Xiao. Obviously, with over half of the original paragraphs being partially or fully omitted, there is a lot of source content which is absent in the self-translation. Meng and Omar (2012) insist that these omissions were intended to tarnish Ah Xiao’s image while burnishing her master’s (p. 569). Although that is debatable, it is true that certain less flattering descriptions of Garter (Schacht)—as well as several more favorable ones of Ah Xiao (Ah Nee)—do not appear in the self-translation. Whatever the intention, the great majority of omissions fall into a few different categories and do not seem arbitrary. Much of what has been cut comes from Ah Xiao’s moments of introspection. Readers are not as immersed in Ah Nee’s internal dialogue as they are in Ah Xiao’s. A working-class woman struggling to support herself and her child, Ah Xiao sometimes wonders, “What powers had chosen this life of drudgery for her?”31 She regrets not insisting on marriage before becoming intimate with her “husband” and feels wounded by his indifference on this issue. Though her friends suggest Baishun leave school to train as a professional storyteller, Ah Xiao very much wants her son to stay in school and hopes that he will one day enjoy a much better life. On a personal note, her own life—her own isolated existence—terrifies her, yet none of this is carried over into the character of Ah Nee. Nor is one intriguing moment in which Ah Xiao feels overwhelmed by hardship:

A soy-sauce bottle on the windowsill weighed down a small flag [Baishun] had made, a slender piece of bamboo poked through the national colors—blue for the sky, white for the sun and red for the earth. Ah Xiao turned to look at it for a moment; the sight of it made her miserable.32

Even though in Chang’s self-translation the flag in question emerges unscathed, the distress which the sight of it causes Ah Xiao does not. This flag is none other than that saluted by the Chinese Nationalists, the flag which flies high across the Republic of China today. When the Chinese short story was first published in 1944, Nationalists still clung to control in the mainland. By the time the self-translation appeared in 1962, however, Chiang

31 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 79 32 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 62

Kai- shek’s forces had already retreated to the island of Taiwan and Communists were firmly in charge of the mainland. This historical context is significant because the English self- translation was not published in Nanjing like its Chinese source text but in Taipei by the Heritage Press. Under Taiwanese martial law, newspapers and literature alike were subject to government censorship, and individuals suspected of expressing views contrary to official policy were detained and often imprisoned, if not executed. Under such a threat to personal safety and reputation, it is plausible that Ah Xiao’s flag-induced misery might have had to be struck from the record. In addition, “Shame, Amah!” eliminates several poignant moments in which Ah Xiao feels sympathy for those around her. Though Ah Xiao is initially jealous that Xiuqin will soon be legally and properly married, she begins to understand her friend’s marital concerns during the thunderstorm, when she hears the newlyweds fighting upstairs, screams alternating with sobs. Earlier that evening, Ah Xiao’s husband tells her that he would like to visit later that night. Although she is exhausted from a long day of work, she does not protest because she can sense how lonely he feels. Ah Xiao even feels compassion at times for Garter, whose libertine behavior she can barely tolerate. In response to Miss Li’s offer to have a new bedcover made, Ah Xiao suddenly feels “a motherly protectiveness towards Garter that [is] both firm and ferocious.”33 Crucially, readers of the self-translation are not privy to many of Ah Xiao’s thoughts and feelings. This renders Ah Nee more insipid and more two-dimensional. Whereas readers may relate to the more well-rounded character of Ah Xiao, whose wide range of feeling and candid observations inspire sympathy, they remain relative strangers to the less developed character of Ah Nee. Similarly, with respect to Garter and Schacht, the omission of details may result in slightly different interpretations of the two. As soon as Garter wakes up, he can “turn on the charm.”34 He delivers the same “seductive Oh, hello!” to whichever woman has caught his eye and is “determined to make women like him, regardless of who they [are].”35 To Garter, dating is like gambling: even when you’re on a winning streak, you have to bow out before sustaining any losses. No single woman is worth the loss or the trouble because “women [are] more or less the same.”36 They are disposable, each one far less precious to him than a strand

33 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 83 34 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 63 35 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p.63 & 66 36 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 65 & 71

of his thinning hair. Schacht is still portrayed as a philandering playboy, but not to the same extent as Garter. Even the analogy drawn between Garter’s bedroom and a high-class prostitute’s boudoir is omitted. In the self-translation, just as Chang omitted many details about Ah Xiao that give her character depth, she likewise omitted many details about Garter which cast him as a degenerate. Readers of “Shame, Amah!” simply do not know as much about Ah Nee and Schacht, who as a result become much flatter, less compelling characters. Since Ah Nee does not share the same thoughts, feelings, and struggles which render Ah Xiao so relatable to readers, and Schacht doesn’t appear as cad-like as Garter, the distinction between maid and master also becomes less pronounced. Another general category of text which has been omitted in Chang’s self-translation is metaphorical language. For example, in the Chinese source text, the appearances of both major and minor characters are described in figurative terms full of rich imagery, but these descriptions are excluded almost entirely in the English self-translation. Ah Xiao is depicted as a victim of abuse, with fingermarks seared across her thin red cheeks. This vulnerable exterior, however, conceals a world of inner beauty underneath. Garter’s face is likened to a piece of blood-stained beef, and his head, grotesquely, to an egg, with two fluffy yellow wings poking out the shell.

As soon as [Ah Xiao] blushed it looked as if she had been slapped in the face. Red welts like fingermarks rose on her thin cheeks. The whole shape of her face gave her a look of suffering. Her fine eyes were like two long slits, and the distant world revealed in them was one of classical beauty that was capable of ‘charming geese and fishes while shaming moon and flowers’.37

The flesh on [Garter’s] face was like undercooked meat, bright red with traces of blood. Of late, he’d taken to cultivating an abbreviated moustache. This made his face look like a particularly nourishing egg which had already begun to hatch open to reveal a pair of tiny yellow wings.38

37 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 64-65 38 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 63

Whereas these portraits arouse respective sympathy and disgust, the redacted portraits of Ah Nee and Schacht appear hollow in comparison: “Ah Nee blushed so that red welts rose on her cheeks as if she had been slapped,” and the master “was tall and handsome with a little mustache.”39 In the original short story, Chang also devotes creative attention to minor characters, whose appearances are sketched out in peculiar, metaphorical portraits. Like a Mongolian woman gazing out at the world through the tassels of her headdress, Xiuqin can only squint through her swollen, infected eyelids. The tailor, Ah Xiao’s husband, looks intelligent with his thick black hair and strong eyebrows, yet buckteeth and a weak chin literally disfigure this impression. Garter’s new girl, the taxi-dancer, has dry, damaged, discolored hair. Coiled around her neck, it looks like a pelt—or even an animal still half-alive—perched on her shoulders.

The two small, reddened eyes set in [Xiuqin’s] large, round face were more closed than open (was she perhaps suffering from trachoma?) and she seemed to show an awareness of this unusual distinction, looking out at the world like a Mongolian woman peering through the heavy, brightly-coloured tassels which covered her face.40

[Ah Xiao’s husband] had a yellowish face, and his dense black hair and eyebrows made him look intelligent. But for some unknown reason, the lower part of his face simply fell away. His bucked teeth were like a hand reaching downwards, pulling his mouth along with it.41

A great clump of curly hair stuck out from the back of her head; it was dry and yellow from over-perming, while the rest of her hair was black. It looked like a fur collar wrapped round her neck, the pelt of some dead animal. In this case it was hard to say for sure that it was actually dead. It seemed to quiver, jumping with every step she took.42

39 “Shame, Amah!,” p. 6 40 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 67-68 41 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 78 42 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 82

Like the descriptions of Ah Xiao and Garter, the depictions of Xiuqin, the tailor, and the taxi-dancer don’t exactly survive in self-translation. Unlike Xiuqin whose infection lends her a mysterious aura of intrigue, Ning Mei simply “peer[s] out from trachoma-reddened eyes.”43 The tailor, branded in the source text by his strange, contorted appearance, becomes faceless. And the taxi-dancer switches out her bizarre hair-pelt for a “tight slit gown.”44 These new, abridged representations all reflect a loss of imagery and metaphorical language, bereft of which the self-translation emerges as a much less imaginative and colorful story. Although there are numerous other omissions, such as the text of the letter from Ah Xiao’s mother, it would be impractical to enumerate each and every single one. Rather, it is the aim of this introduction to identify general tendencies inherent in Chang’s process of revision in order to understand on a global scale what sort of information has been omitted, added, and altered. From the above discussion of textual omissions, it can be observed that Chang deleted many details which would flesh out the character sketches of Ah Nee and Schacht. Though details omitted from the story far outnumber those added or altered, the latter are still of interest as they provide another means by which to examine how the story was revised in self-translation.

Additions In certain cases, the addition of information seems to serve an explicative function. When Ah Nee’s husband phones to check on her, readers learn that he “had gone out to telephone from a store,”45 a clarification which is absent in the source text. Likewise, whereas Ah Xiao simply “[goes] downstairs to fetch two buckets of water”46; Ah Nee “[brings] up several pails of water from the tap in the yard.”47 These supplemental details may suggest that Chang wished to help target readers better visualize the general milieu of 1940s wartime Shanghai, an idea which will be returned to shortly. Another target text addition elucidates through illustration. After Ah Nee’s husband recounts a tale of the strange creatures found in the sea, he asks: “Have you seen the big octopi in the tanks outside Cantonese restaurants?”48 This image—aquariums lining the entrances to Chinese restaurants—does not appear in the source text. Though minor, it is not

43 “Shame, Amah!,” p. 8 44 “Shame, Amah!,” p. 13 45 “Shame, Amah!,” p. 14 46 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 82 47 “Shame, Amah!.” p. 13 48 “Shame, Amah!,” p. 12

insignificant; it is indeed striking because it imparts readers with an image to which they can perhaps relate.

Alterations Certain revisions may appear random. To return to the preceding example, for instance, Ah Nee and her husband discuss seals and octopi; Ah Xiao and hers chat about sea otters and cuttlefish. Other revisions, however, appear deliberate, even if we can only speculate at the reasoning behind them. For instance, whereas Baishun’s teacher is concerned about students catching cold and suggests they wear face masks, Shin Fa’s teacher is concerned about students catching fly-borne diseases and warns them to avoid the insects. Perhaps this last alteration could be construed as a cultural adaptation since most Anglophones other than medical personnel are not in the habit of wearing facemasks. If this were the case, however, there are an array of equivalent accessories commonly used in Anglophone countries which could have filled the gap, such as earmuffs, scarves, woolen hats, gloves, even nose-warmers. It thus seems plausible that Chang changed this detail to elaborate on the story setting and add cohesion to her work. The reason why Shin Fa mentions his teacher’s warning about flies in the first place is because the elderly woman had noticed flies buzzing around the kitchen. Not only does this create a palpable sense of the stifling mugginess in which the characters are confined, but it also forges a connection to the final scene of the story in which “two flies [come] out of the snug warmth of the kitchen and [buzz] overhead.”49 The cohesion is even more pronounced when referring to the source text: “The cramped quality of their warm reunion gave birth to two flies which buzzed around their heads.”50 As the day goes on, the flies—and the demeaning, sweaty filth which they imply—follow Ah Xiao more and more closely until they hover persistently overhead. Only after a new day has begun, and the story has pushed through its climax, do they pass into memory, just like the rainstorm before them. Although there are those modifications which can be plausibly attributed to cultural considerations, they will not be discussed in detail within the present overview. Rather, the influence of culture on translation will be revisited in the Research Findings section of this thesis, which will provide a detailed account of strategies undertaken by translators to render culturally-specific items and related phenomena into target languages.

49 “Shame, Amah!,” p. 15 50 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 88

Nevertheless, there is one such modification which is pertinent to the present discussion. In Chang’s self-translation, just as she eliminated metaphorical descriptions of Ah Xiao, Garter, Xiuqin, and other characters, she also cut a penetrating depiction of the Blonde:

The voice of the Blonde was as sweet as a toffeed candy-twist, and everything she said was coated with affected friendliness. Ah Xiao’s responses were similarly false. With her shy laughter she seemed unable to bridge the social gap between them…She made her voice sharp and shrill, emitting a series of crackling sounds. The world of foreign language was always happy, well-to-do, founded on sand.51

[Ah Nee] acted up to the yellow-haired woman, shyly laughing, emitting in the foreign language the series of piercing chirps as happy and unreal as the world in advertisements.52

The source text’s portrait of the Blonde is rather unflattering. She is friendly, but her friendliness is a veneer, just as it would seem so is the happiness of “the world of foreign language,” or more precisely, of English-speaking society. Translating for an Anglophone target audience, Chang may have felt this to be overly offensive. That might explain why she associated this carefree facade with something more universal, like the world of advertisement. With her subtle modification, Chang’s critique no longer targets her would-be Anglophone readers and their society; instead, the critique takes aim at the false promises of material comforts which, despite all claims by their manufacturers to the contrary, will never provide spiritual contentment or peace. As mentioned earlier, one glaring omission in Chang’s self-translation is the text of Ah Xiao’s letter from her mother. Far more curious than this omission, though, is the textual modification to which it is coupled and by which Ah Xiao is given the anachronistic ability to read. In the Chinese source text, Ah Xiao is portrayed as illiterate. She asks her husband to read aloud her mother’s letter, self-consciously explaining, “There are a couple of sentences in it I didn’t quite understand.”53 Soon thereafter, her illiteracy is confirmed when it is explained that Baishun must write letters back home on his mother’s behalf. Rendering Ah

51 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 67 52 “Shame, Amah!,” p. 8 53 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 79

Xiao incapable of even writing or reading letters from home, Ah Xiao’s illiteracy intensifies her emotional isolation and thus may strike a sympathetic chord in readers. Her lack of education is likewise demonstrated by her inability to transcribe phone numbers correctly. In the very scene from which the self-translation takes its title, Garter scolds Ah Xiao, complaining “Shame, Amah!”54 for this precise reason; he is frustrated because he cannot figure out who it was who called while he was out. He dials the numbers which she has jotted down, but to no avail. They are all wrong. Towards the end of the story, Garter once more feels irritated by this particular ineptitude of Ah Xiao, yet this time he chooses to hold his tongue. Interestingly, Chang retains both references to Ah Xiao’s innumeracy but expunges those which expose her illiteracy. “Ah Xiao often [has] Baishun write back on her behalf,”55 yet “Ah Nee often [speaks] of Shin Fa in her letters home.”56 This alteration, though undoubtedly slight, may significantly affect how the character is perceived by target readers. No longer illiterate, Ah Nee may appear less deserving of their sympathy. What makes Chang’s editorial decision even stranger is that, at the time the story was set, most Chinese were in fact illiterate. According to The New York Times, the literacy rate in China was only 20% in 1950 (Plafker & International Herald Tribune). Though the literacy rate may have been higher only a decade prior, before many intellectuals and wealthier, more learned families with connections overseas fled in the late 1940s, it is not preposterous to assume that a working-class woman from the countryside like Ah Xiao would be unable to read. Finally, there are two other crucial revisions to the text which must be addressed. From the opening scene, readers are introduced to Ah Xiao (or Ah Nee) and her son, who we have no reason to assume is anything other than biological. Later in the day, while Ah Xiao’s friends show interest in the child, she herself “glance[s] over at Baishun, a widow’s sadness welling up in her heart. Although she had a husband, it wasn’t much different from being on her own: she had to rely on herself.”57 Though there may be some ambiguity concerning the relationship between Ah Xiao and the tailor—we know that they were never formally wed— Baishun is unequivocally her son.

54 “Shame, Amah!,” p. 6 55 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 80 56 “Shame, Amah!,” p. 12 57 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 77

Nonetheless, in Chang’s self-translation, Shin Fa “was not her son just as her husband was not her real husband. [Ah Nee] had adopted him from an orphanage. As she looked at him, a sadness welled up inside her as if he was a widow’s only boy.”58 With the flick of a pen, the child has become adopted. What inspiration led to this baffling turn of events is unknown, but Chang does not stop there. Ah Xiao’s “marriage” to the tailor is delegitimized further with the addition of another husband!

Schacht...knew about Amah. She had shown him an Australian pound note and asked him how much it was worth. A week later she had asked him to address an envelope to Australia. Crimson and smiling, she told him she had gone to have a photograph of herself and Shin Fa taken and was sending it to her husband who was working in Australia. Apparently it was the first time he had ever sent her money. Then there was this tailor, said to be her husband. It was not uncommon, from what he heard.59

Towards the end of the story, from an unexpected rush of Schacht’s stream of consciousness, we learn that Ah Nee has a second husband, living in Australia of all places. His existence, however, is never once confirmed or acknowledged by Ah Nee herself. Perplexed readers may wonder, who is this woman after all? Is she in love with the tailor or the man in Australia? Neither or both? Chang’s self-translation does not unravel this mystery, nor does it provide justification for these two dramatic changes, yet perhaps these revisions reflect a vision of love which is at once pragmatic and realistic. Ah Nee may have adopted Shin Fa because she had difficulties conceiving, or because she wanted to start a family, or simply out of compassion. If Schacht is correct and there is a romantic partner in Australia, maybe the other man and Ah Nee have decided to see other people while apart. Or maybe their relationship has already come to an end, but they remain in touch. No matter how readers interpret these two new pieces of information, either as signs of Ah Nee’s high or low moral character, their interpretations will be shaped by their own socio-cultural expectations. These last two alterations fit into and accentuate the story’s overall reworking. On a rudimentary level, the story remains unchanged. However, as demonstrated in the discussion above, significant revisions transform—and obliterate—both physical and emotional

58 “Shame, Amah!,” p. 11 59 “Shame, Amah!,” p. 12

depictions of characters; eliminate metaphorical language and several scenes which are central to the original story; moderate references to Western society which could insult and alienate target Anglophone readers; and present the protagonist as an adoptive mother and bigamist. It is not the aim of this thesis to make a value judgment of the self-translated text, nor to identify the motivations behind Chang’s revisions. The objective of this section is merely to help readers understand and appreciate the research findings of the present study, as discussed in Chapter 6.

Critique of “Shame, Amah!”

While “Shame, Amah!” retains the basic structure of the source text “Guihua,” it fails to communicate its depth of meaning and “narrative sophistication” (Hoyan, 1996, p. 281). The losses in translation which this analysis implies are likely the result of multiple factors, yet chief among them are the concrete revisions which the text has undergone in self- translation. These create a target text open to new interpretations which do not necessarily tally with those of the original. As previously noted, Shui Jing (1996) interprets “Guihua” as a parable of biblical proportions. The virtuous heroine Ah Xiao contends against a metaphorical world of pretense, promiscuity, and perversion of moral values. In the penultimate scene, thunder and lightning bewilder Shanghai, inspiring fear across the city while graciously washing away the sins of man. Only after this terrifying baptism does life begin fresh and anew. Hoyan (1996), for her part, construes the story as a portrait of a kind if imperfect woman struggling to cope with the inevitable sadness of human existence. Neither Shui Jing nor Hoyan discern socio-political undertones in the text. In fact, the latter insists, “it is this neglect of immediate social concern that enables the story to rise to a universal level” (p. 130). Other scholars, however, disagree. Meng and Omar (2012) assert that the story is absolutely political and claim that “Guihua” was written for the very purpose of resisting colonialism. Yet, in the process of self-translation, Chang obliterated this message and manipulated the text to conform to imperialist ideology. In their not so impartial opinion, Chang the translator has “murdered” Chang the writer (p. 574). They further assert that this authorial manipulation of the text mirrors the translator’s own manipulation by her new American “host society” (p. 569). Meng and Omar (2012) argue that Chang, after immigrating in 1955 to the United States, experienced a crisis of identity. As a marginalized diasporic writer, she was pulled in

opposing directions by conflicting interests. On the one hand, she craved recognition and was willing to do whatever it took to be accepted as a writer in her new homeland; on the other hand, she wanted to stay firmly connected to China, to her old home country. In their assessment, she ultimately chose to assimilate, submitting to the hegemonic ideology and poetics of her birthplace’s former colonizers. Even so, these academics assert that there is one piece of her homeland which she manages to hold onto and convey through self-translation, that is culture. Across the Pacific, US-based professors Ann C. Carver and Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang (1990) also discern a political message in the piece. However, they maintain that it is the systemic oppression of women, rather than the fallacies of imperialism, which the author intends to denounce. Taking women’s studies as their frame of reference, Carver and Chang direct their attention to the complexity and diversity of women’s experiences in 1940s Shanghai. Even though Chinese society had emerged from feudalism, patriarchal traditions continued to dictate societal norms, which in turn prescribed the roles of men and women and circumscribed their behavior. Carver and Chang claim that “Shame” is an “artistic portrayal of people unconsciously enacting their social roles,” delivered with “caustic sarcasm, freezing irony, and a grim vision of reality” (p. 4, 5). To them, it shines a light on the suffering of oppressed women in a repressive society. This conception of the self-translation and its star character is intriguing because it runs completely counter to assertions regarding the Chinese original put forth by Shui Jing and Hoyan. Whereas Shui Jing and Hoyan maintain that Ah Xiao is neither weak nor oppressed but rather “optimistic and dynamic,” Carver and Chang perceive Ah Nee to be passive and subservient (Hoyan, 1996, p. 130; Carver & Chang, 1990, p. 4). Their evaluation would seem to be consistent with that of Meng and Omar, who deplore what they see as her representation of the stereotypical “silent subaltern woman” (p. 571). Though Carver and Chang argue that Ah Nee slips at times into “passivity and wordless submission,” they still see her as a complex, creative character with a rich imagination. She is living under straitened circumstances and in the “demeaning position” as maid to a Western man, but she strives to live an honorable life with dignity and self-respect. Clearly, different scholars—and of course readers—will take away different interpretations of the story and its characters.

Chapter 3. The Nature of CSIs and Approaches to their Treatment

From the “literal vs. free” dichotomy to new avenues of cultural inquiry

While the history of translation stretches back millennia, it was only in the late twentieth century that translation scholars first formally acknowledged the now commonplace idea that language and culture are closely, sometimes inextricably, interrelated. Sparked by this acknowledgement, the “cultural turn” of the 1990s revolutionized the way translation theorists approached translation as a theoretical field and practice. No longer considered a purely linguistic endeavor, translation became seen as entailing a transfer of both language and culture. Linguistic analysis, while not altogether discarded, was supplemented by approaches originating from a cultural perspective, and approaches that evaluated the socio-historical influence on the process of translation and the target texts themselves. The field of translation had been slowly evolving since mid-twentieth century, but the cultural turn inaugurated a new era. Before the 1950s, scholars and practitioners had been locked in a relentless, cyclical debate as to whether translations should be “literal” or “free,” “faithful” to the source text or to the target language. In the following decade, however, Eugene Nida moved the thought process forward by introducing the concept of “equivalence” and, instead of focusing on polar extremes, shifted the discussion into a more open-ended and receptive space. While linguists continued to analyze source- and target-text pairs, searching for translation “shifts,” scholars in Germany began to advocate a more functionalist approach. In accordance with skopos and other related functionalist theories, the evaluations of target texts began to be based not on whether they had achieved some ill-defined “equivalent effect,” but to what degree they fulfilled their intended function. As long as a target text accomplished its purpose in the target culture, it could be said to be successful—whether “equivalent” to the source text or not. As the field continued to evolve and expand, ‘polysystem’ scholars began to explore the historical and literary systems of cultures around the world and the implications for the texts situated within. Descriptive translation studies tipped the balance in favor of target- oriented methodologies and emphasized the norms, both explicit and implicit, which govern the practice of translation as it takes place in the real world.

Over a period of several decades, the emerging synthesis of theoretical and practical possibilities in translation paved the way for the cultural turn, which encouraged even more approaches from multi-disciplinary perspectives. Translation was no longer confined to the linguistic sphere; instead, it had become regarded as a fully-fledged process of cultural transfer, necessitating a wider scope of analysis with inputs from gender, post-colonial, and cross-cultural studies. During this process of elaboration, new topics emerged as means of investigating the role played by culture in the act of translation. With importance, the study of culture-specific items (CSIs) developed out of scholarly writings from the late twentieth century and continues to this day to attract academic interest. Following the evolution of the relevant literature, we can get a sense of how scholars’ ideas about the nature, categorization, treatment, and effects of CSIs have matured over time.

A glance back at the literature on CSIs

In the 1980s, scholars such as British practitioner Peter Newmark and Croatian linguist Vladimir Ivir highlighted the unique difficulties posed by cultural references in laying out prescriptive frameworks specifically for their translation. A few years later, Thinking Translation series co-authors Sandór Hervey and Ian Higgins as well as Egyptian- British translator Mona Baker followed suit with their own proposals for CSI treatments. While Hervey and Higgins’ model was more prescriptive in nature, echoing and overlapping with aspects of both Ivir and Newmark, Baker’s proposal adopted a more descriptive, pragmatic approach. Baker’s In Other Words, recognized now as a classic analysis, discussed how professional translators actually cope with the multi-faceted issue of non-equivalence at word level, of which there can be various contributing causes yet among which CSIs top the list. These early reflections on translation of CSIs, all developed as chapters in larger works, generated greater interest in the topic. These advancements, in turn, led to the publication of more academic writing dedicated exclusively to its treatment. While zooming in on CSIs in particular, the descriptive analyses which began to appear in prominent journals also zoomed out, addressing a broader and more meaningful perspective. Further, certain works put forward typologies of CSIs to help the reader understand which lexical items might be classified as such. These publications began to consider variables and factors that were likely to have an impact on the choice of translation procedure, such as genre of the text,

textual function of the given item, the cultural ‘distance’ between the two languages, and the tolerance of foreignness on behalf of the target culture. As late as 1993, there were still lingering doubts as to whether the translation of culture—and, by extension, CSIs—was possible. Yet, three years later, Spanish academic Javier Franco Aixelá put this question to rest once and for all in his seminal essay on the topic of CSIs. Remarkably, up until that time, most authors had refrained from assigning a specific definition to the term ‘cultural-specific item’ or its multiple variants, “attributing the meaning of the notion to a sort of collective intuition” (Aixelá, 1996, p. 57). Instead, they contented themselves with more or less detailed potential taxonomies of CSIs—noting the usual lexical fields, such as “food” or “religion,”—under which these items could be argued to typically fall. Aixelá, however, proposed a tentative definition, and intentionally left it rather flexible in order to accommodate a perpetual ‘intercultural evolution.’ He compiled a list— exhaustive in his opinion—of the translation procedures which could be adopted in the case of CSIs. These procedures were then separated into two main groups, based on whether they represented a ‘conservation’ or ‘substitution’ of the source culture, and were plotted along a continuum based on the resulting degree of ‘intercultural manipulation.’ This design additionally utilized a new dichotomy gaining currency in the translation world at that time, that of ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’ as coined by Lawrence Venuti. By Aixelá’s logic, ‘conservative’ translation procedures, such as ‘repetition’ and ‘orthographic adaptation,’ produce a foreignizing effect on the target text, while ‘substitutive’ procedures, such as ‘naturalization’ and ‘deletion,’ yield a domesticating one. This contribution to the academic and practical inquiry of CSIs should not be underestimated. Scholars continue to rework and refine Aixelá’s ideas, continuously developing a more nuanced, yet global, understanding of the phenomenon. In the early 2000s, Moroccan-based scholar Eirlys Davies argued for a macroscopic approach to their study. She asserts that, instead of treating each CSI in a text individually, translators might find it useful to determine a translation orientation for entire networks of CSIs, which could be sorted by textual function. By identifying and analyzing CSIs as networks, rather than individual instances, translators could perceive their greater collective contribution to the text as a whole. From Davies’ point of view, this would help translators choose more appropriate translation procedures in different contexts, and ensure a more reasoned and systematic treatment of CSIs overall. Although Davies designates her own menu of translation procedures, she avoids categorizing them by effect on the target text or plotting them along a

scale of ‘intercultural manipulation.’ Further, she calls into question the fundamental validity of such scales and the implicit assumption upon which they are based—namely, that a static correlation exists between particular translation procedures and effects, irrespective of language pair, text, or a host of other variables. In spite of such doubts expressed by some scholars, other academics engaged in the study of CSIs continue to use scales very similar to Aixelá’s. Several have reordered the procedures, while others have moderated their polarity and developed the split scale into more fluid spectra (to allow for representation of intermediate and other potentialities). Belgian-based academics Erika Mussche and Klaas Willems, for example, make a case for ‘neutralization,’—a general orientation situated at the scale’s mid-point—as being both on equal footing and distinct from domestication and foreignization. Synthesizing previous systems of procedural classification, British theorist James Dickins introduces alternate continua along which CSI translation procedures can be evaluated. In contrast to Aixelá’s grouping of multiple disparate procedures under the vague titles of ‘conservation’ or ‘substitution,’ Dickins’ multi-level model permits a more detailed investigation of the procedures with the application of several complimentary, yet unique, dichotomies. His framework brings to light subtle differences between analogous procedures, and enriches our basic understanding of CSIs and the techniques adopted by translators to render them. Writing from Malaysia, Harald Martin Olk calls for greater differentiation within discussions of potential textual effect. His main contribution to literature on CSIs, however, is actually an experimental framework for their quantitative analysis. Even though he acknowledges the subjectivity intrinsic to their identification and the classification of chosen translation procedures, Olk insists that comprehensive quantitative approaches can support and strengthen qualitative (and often selective) studies. He concludes that a mixed approach, working from a joint quantitative and qualitative perspective, can compensate for the individual deficiencies of each, bolster research credibility, and broaden the scope of CSI analysis.

So what are CSIs?

The Cultural Turn of Translation Studies brought the importance of culture and its connection to language to the forefront of theoretical discussion. By that time, language had been universally recognized as an expression of culture, but scholars wanted to dig deeper

and better understand how these two concepts were interwoven. To do so, they sought to isolate cultural elements from those of a primarily linguistic or pragmatic order, as contextualized in authentic texts. This is how the first efforts to analyze and classify culture- bound content began. Researchers discovered that culture manifests itself in language in a variety of forms. At the textual level, cultural identity can be construed from discursive and rhetorical features, including “grammatical categories that only exist in [a given] language, vocative forms (tu/vous), the use of certain rhetoric, metaphors and idioms” (Nedergaard-Larsen, 1993, p. 210). At a semantic or lexical level, cultural identity can be perceived through “references to culture-specific entities such as customs, traditions, clothes, food, or institutions” (Davies 2003, p. 68). From the former arise ‘culture-bound problems’ which are ‘intralinguistic,’ and from the latter those that are ‘extralinguistic’ (Nedergaard-Larsen, 1993, p. 210). It is these ‘extralinguistic culture-bound problems’ that “reflect the material and intellectual culture from which a source text emerges” and which are designated by the term ‘culture-specific item’ (Mussche & Willems, 2010, p. 475). As previously noted, prior to Aixelá, there was no fixed definition—or even an established label—for the concept now generally known as ‘culture-specific items,’ or CSIs. Some scholars had attempted rudimentary explications, but others proposed provisional typologies instead. Open-ended by nature, these conceptual maps stimulated further consideration of those defining features which can be said to characterize any given CSI. For example, Nedergaard-Larsen’s descriptive framework of ‘extralinguistic culture- bound problems’ (or CSIs) expands upon earlier models and comprises four main categories—geographic, historical, societal, and cultural—which are then further subdivided into smaller subcategories (1993, p. 211). Geographic CSIs include ‘cultural geography’ references, such as the names of towns and streets; topographical features, such as mountains and rivers; meteorological phenomena; and biological creatures, both flora and fauna. Historical CSIs consist of references to famous figures, events, and architectural sites, while societal CSIs denote a miscellaneous collection of entities, ranging from political parties, found in the ‘politics’ subset, to food, housing, and clothing, located under the subset labeled as ‘ways of life and customs.’ The category of ‘culture’ covers the subcategories of religion, education, media, and, perplexingly, culture, and is comprised of references to places of worship, religious holidays, cultural institutions, dining establishments, and sports (1993, p. 211).

This one single typology reflects the considerable difficulty of extracting and classifying culture-specific phenomena. Some classifications appear arbitrary, if not erroneous (e.g., ‘restaurants’ and ‘cafés’ belong to the ‘cultural’ category, while ‘food’ falls under ‘ways of life and customs’ and is thus classified as ‘societal’), and there is a certain degree of ambiguity throughout. There appear to be three separate strata of ‘culture’ as, within this typology of specifically culture-bound lexis, there is both a specific category and a subcategory entitled ‘culture.’ Consequently, fellow researchers may wonder if the CSIs belonging to the subcategory ‘culture’ subsumed within the category ‘culture’ are somehow doubly or triply ‘cultural’ than the rest. While such inconsistencies do not invalidate the merits of the typological approach or its usefulness in exploratory research, its implicit ambiguity as to what constitutes a CSI was substantially resolved when a consensus among experts in the field accepted the definition of a CSI proposed by Aixelá. According to this Spanish scholar, CSIs are characteristically dynamic and their actualization depends on multiple independent variables, including the source and target language pair concerned and the resulting ‘intercultural gap’, the denotative and connotative value of the item in question, its textual function, and time as observed from a historical perspective. Aixelá writes that “...in translation a CSI does not exist of itself, but as the result of a conflict arising from any linguistically represented reference in a source text which, when transferred to a target language, poses a translation problem due to the nonexistence or to the different value (whether determined by ideology, usage, frequency, etc.) of the given item in the target language culture” (1996, p. 57). More precisely, a lexical item may acquire ‘culture-specific’ status if the concept which it denotes, whether abstract or concrete, possesses “no recognizable meaning” for a given target audience (Baker, 2018, p. 19; Davies, 2003, p. 67). Even if the concept can be recognized and understood to a certain extent, its significance to the text cannot. Further, even if there is a corresponding item in the target language which has an identical propositional meaning, its connotations and associations will be dissimilar to those of the original reference (Davies, 2003, p. 67). The meaning of a given item, however, is only one factor used to measure its cultural load. Another important factor to consider is time. CSIs are never permanent, “no matter which pair of cultures is involved” because intercultural relationships are continuously in flux, and “objects, habits, or values once restricted to one community [can obviously] come to be shared by others” (Aixelá, 1996, p. 57-58). Initially alien to a given target culture, certain CSIs can lose their sense of exoticism and become more transparent over time if the

receiving society accepts their entry into its ‘cultural universe’ (Aixelá, 1996, p. 55). In the case of North American CSIs, due to cultural hegemony exerted by the United States, many are becoming globally-used “universal terms,” gradually losing their exotic flavor and “English cultural specificity” (Aixelá, 1996, p. 55). This same process of ‘deforeignization’ can even be observed within one single text. If an individual CSI continues to reappear in the text, its perceived ‘foreignness’ may progressively diminish with each reoccurrence (Davies, 2003, p. 76). On the other hand, as cultures evolve, politics shift, and technology advances, some CSIs may become more rather than less ‘foreign,’ and thus less transparent, to a given target culture. With so many factors and variables to consider, it’s difficult to formulate a comprehensive yet concise explanation of the term ‘CSI.’ Nonetheless, Olk’s explanation manages to neatly summarize the key ideas: “Cultural references are those lexical items in a source text which, at a given point in time, refer to objects or concepts which do not exist in a specific target culture or which deviate in their textual function significantly in denotation or connotation from lexical equivalents available in the target culture” (2013, p. 346).

Approaches towards the study of CSIs

As a reflection of the inherent “fuzziness” of language, nearly all lexical items, culture-specific or otherwise, have “blurred edges” and represent a hermeneutic challenge to the translator (Baker, 2018, p. 16). Meaning, to the dismay or perhaps delight of lexicographers, is not as simple, fixed, or easily grasped as might be assumed. Intralingually speaking, the same lexical item may acquire different denotations or connotations in different contexts. And as languages continuously evolve, their constituent semantic fields accept new material, while relinquishing that which is old and less relevant (Baker, 2018, p. 19). The resultant lexical complexity, as manifested at the textual and supratextual level, is then magnified in the process of interlingual transfer, which brings together two disparate, culturally-informed asymmetrical lexes. To navigate the transfer, translators must draw from these overlapping yet distinct lexical pools and determine, out of multiple possibilities, the real import of the original text so that they can then find its most suitable match in the target language. From first source-text reading to final target-language product, nearly this entire process is inherently subjective. It is not surprising then that the rendering of CSIs also entails subjectivity. Even their identification, categorization, and evaluation is intuitive and subjective to a point. Further

complicating any CSI translation or analysis is the fact that no CSI is the same; nor do any two bear the exact same connotations or cultural load. Some may be readily transparent while others are inscrutably obscure (Nedergaard-Larsen, 1993). Some may become more familiar over time, while others may become less so (Aixelá, 1996). CSIs are intricate and tricky, and scholars are still debating how best to address the particular challenges they present. Some authors, such as Nedergaard-Larsen and Baker, call for micro-level approaches. They claim that, due to multiple interacting variables such as degree of opacity and textual function, it is not feasible nor helpful to adopt any general strategy or precise guidelines for CSI translation (Baker, 2018, p. 19). Instead, they prefer a “flexible, ad hoc [translation] practice” in which each CSI can be considered individually and up-close in its immediate context so as to discern an appropriate translation strategy (Nedergaard-Larsen, 1993, p. 233). On the other hand, while appreciating the importance of the nuances and context of an individual CSI, other scholars assert that the micro-level approach should be complemented by a more comprehensive, macro-level methodology (Davies, 2003). For instance, Davies suggests that, before the translator adopts a translation procedure for any particular CSI, he or she should group those items into sets, or ‘networks,’ according to their intended textual effect (Davies, 2003, p. 89). In this process, the translator gains a broader perspective of how the CSIs contribute, both individually and collectively, to the given text. Just as different CSIs will vary in meaning and function, different CSI ‘networks’ may play very different textual roles and thus demand different strategies in translation (Davies, 2003, p. 97). Emphasizing the intratextual aspects of CSIs, this proposal recommends the adoption of a general strategy for each CSI network, which can then be adapted as needed for each specific item. Olk (2013) takes this macro-level idea in a different direction. In summarizing the relevant literature to date, he observes a selective tendency among descriptive qualitative studies to focus either on particular CSIs or sub-fields of CSIs, e.g. proper names or geographical terms (p. 344). Olk notes that such selective approaches “may give undue weight to some items or lexical fields while ignoring others” and, consequently, are unlikely to provide an impartial and reliable account of how culture-specific language has been handled in translation (Olk, 2013, p. 345). As a remedy, he recommends taking a “global perspective” and analyzing the treatment of all CSIs in a text, not simply those belonging to a pre-selected group, in order to evaluate the overall degree of culture specificity transferred and/or lost (Olk, 2013, p. 355). Translators, in Olk’s opinion, can benefit from this activity as

well because, after assessing how they have rendered CSIs in the target language, they can adjust translations of individual items if they feel the overall effect, or cultural load conveyed, is not suitable for the translation task at hand (Olk, 2013, p. 355).

Categorizations of CSI translation procedures

Regardless of the adopted approach, articles on CSIs almost without exception include lists of possible translation procedures—either describing observed translation procedures or suggesting their own. Though the taxonomies feature various names, most of the procedures remain roughly the same. Generally speaking, these include some variation of direct transfer, transliteration, literal translation, paraphrase, omission, and cultural adaptation. Naturally, translators cannot and do not implement one single CSI procedure throughout a text; rather, they alternate between and combine procedures (Mussche & Willems, 2010, p. 489; Aixelá, 1996, p. 60). While “a single designation in the source corpus is not necessarily associated with one and the same translation throughout the target corpus...different items in the source text may also be conveyed by a single translation” (Mussche & Willems, 2010, p. 489). Further, there is no procedure which befits all items or contexts, nor is there one which can be established permanently for any item or context (Mussche & Willems, 2010, p. 491). Languages, cultures, and CSIs themselves are always changing.

A (not very) new dichotomy: Venuti’s foreignization vs. domestication

Despite differences in names and details, proposed frameworks of procedures for CSI translation tend to be founded upon the same dichotomous model upon which Aixelá based his own: that designated by Lawrence Venuti’s ‘foreignization’ and ‘domestication.’ This polarity, however, was first famously articulated by German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher in 1813. In his most influential lecture, entitled “On the different methods of translating,” Schleiermacher states, “...for the translator proper who truly wishes to bring together these two quite separate persons, his writer and his reader...there are only two possibilities. Either the translator leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him” (p. 49).

Schleiermacher designated the former as ‘alienation’ and the latter as ‘naturalization’; yet, these concepts have been reworked by numerous theorists, Venuti included, and have reappeared in multiple iterations since. Eugene Nida spoke of ‘formal equivalence’ as opposed to ‘dynamic equivalence’; Peter Newmark of ‘semantic translation’ versus ‘communicative translation’; Christiane Nord of ‘documentary translation’ and ‘instrumental translation’; and Gideon Toury of ‘adequacy’ versus ‘acceptability’ (Munday, 2016, p. 311). No matter the labels, these distinctions all allude to the same two possible orientations for a translation practice—either towards the source or target language-culture—and the “two basic goals of translation: that of preserving the characteristics of the source text as far as possible, even where this yields an exotic or strange effect, and that of adapting it to produce a target text which seems normal, familiar and accessible to the target audience” (Davies, 2003, p. 69). Aixelá (1996) refers to these conflicting orientations and goals as a “double tension” experienced by the target text, which must simultaneously represent an ‘alien’ source text to members of a target language-culture and constitute a valid, legitimate text in and of itself within (p. 60). This “double tension” can be conceptualized as “a continuum from...complete non- translation at the one end to total adaption at the other” (Nedergaard-Larsen, 1993, p. 219). Though these two extreme approaches, i.e. full-scale foreignization or domestication, are theoretically possible, they are not necessarily common, desirable, or practical (Davies, 2003, p. 72). The former could result in an utter lack of comprehension due to an unacceptable excess of unfamiliarity, while the latter could lead to confusion due to a gaping ‘credibility gap’ produced by the foreign text’s complete loss of what originally made it foreign (Olk, 2013, p. 345; Nedergaard-Larsen, 1993, p. 234).

Beyond foreignization and domestication

As a pivotal figure in translation studies, James S. Holmes notes that “in practice, translators...perform a series of pragmatic choices, here retentive, there recreative, at this point historicizing or exoticizing, at that point modernizing or naturalizing” (as cited in Davies, 2003). His observation brings to light the necessary and natural variation at play within the process of translation. Regardless of the global orientation chosen for a text, the entirety of its textual elements usually cannot be uniformly rendered by one single procedure or even group of similar procedures. Translators, seeking to produce an acceptable target text that can do justice to the original, contend with competing inclinations and appear to do their

best to strike a balance between source and target language-cultures they believe appropriate for the text and task. Refining upon Holmes’ observation, Davies (2003) remarks that CSI translation, like any other, “involves compromise...translators tend to preserve some CSIs and transform others, adding information here and removing inessentials there...calculating which adaptations will best suit the needs and tastes of their particular target audiences, while preserving the character of the original texts” (p. 97). Translated texts, as they exist in the real world, represent amalgams of strategies and techniques, objectives and impulses, pressures and conventions. To Davies’ mind, translated texts, or even the procedures by which they are rendered, cannot be categorized as unequivocally ‘domesticating’ or ‘foreignizing’ as proposed frameworks might imply. Citing blurred distinctions between procedures and their arbitrary ordering, she calls into question Aixelá’s scale of intercultural manipulation (p. 70-71). Davies points out that distinct procedures from opposite ends of the spectrum, considered as either unconditionally foreignizing or domesticating, may have identical effects on a text and thus not be so different after all. For example, she writes, “An exotic effect may be achieved by preserving a CSI, but also by creating a new CSI not present in the source text; and while the addition of some explicit clarification of a CSI may make the target text more accessible, so may [its] omission” (Davies, 2003, p. 97). An outlier in the CSI researcher community, Davies classifies a set of possible CSI translation procedures, but does not order them along any sort of scale meant to measure their degree of foreignization, the translation’s distance from the original, or otherwise (Davies, 2003, p. 71). She is not convinced that they “can be consistently ordered on [such] a scale,” and continues, “Nor is there a predictable correlation between the degree of manipulation of the source text and the extent to which the target text is domesticated” (Davies, 2003, p. 71). In contrast with a general tendency among scholars to discern global translation approaches from selected CSI translations, Davies insists that this cannot be done (Olk, 2013, p. 344- 345). Davies also discusses the complexity of ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization,’ the notions upon which many CSI models are based. She notes that, depending on the source- target language pair in question, these terms may take on different implications. A domesticating translation from a minority language into one more dominant may be denounced as ‘cultural imperialism’; on the other hand, an equally domesticating translation

from a dominant language into a minority language may be hailed as “a means of resistance, a ‘strategic intervention’ against cultural domination” (Davies, 2003, p. 69). Other scholars who, unlike Davies, apply modified versions of Aixelá’s scale to their analyses, still question their soundness and elaborate upon them as thought needed. Mussche and Willems (2010), for example, claim that “the traditional dichotomy between foreignisation and domestication is not entirely adequate” and adopt Emer O’Sullivan’s (2000) tripartite model of translation effect (p. 485). This model accounts for three possibilities, namely foreignisation, domestication, and neutralisation, wherein the last possibility is conceived as a mid-way point between the two formerly mentioned poles (Mussche & Willems, 2010, p. 485). With respect to their corpus, Mussche and Willems observe, “transliteration clearly has a foreignising effect, yet the other procedures do not result in domestication but rather...neutralization” (Mussche & Willems, 2010, p. 485). Dickins (2012), however, points out that the boundaries between foreignization and domestication, even if insulated by an intermediate ‘culture-neutral’ zone, remain ‘fuzzy’ (p. 44). A desire to better understand the linguistic distinctions of this binary was possibly one of the factors which led him to delineate dichotomies complimentary to Venuti’s. These include “non-lexicalised/ungrammatical” versus “lexicalised/grammatical”; “semantically anomalous” versus “semantically systematic”; and lastly “synonymy-oriented” versus “non- synonymy oriented,” which covers instances of situational equivalence and cultural analogy (p. 45). Stacking these dichotomies one on top of the other, Dickins arranges translation procedures proposed by various scholars into columns underneath, depending on to which categories of the four different, superimposed dichotomies they belong. For procedures considered as foreignizing, he further distinguishes between those operating at the lexical level from those operating at the structural level, whether morphotactic or syntactic. By constructing this intricate visual grid of CSI translation procedures, Dickins provides fellow scholars and students with a means by which to analyze them in greater theoretical detail. Yet his model does not completely resolve the ambiguity found in others. “The boundaries between what is lexicalised and what is not are not always clear”; just because a form is ‘non-systematic’ “does not necessarily mean that [it] cannot be understood”; and there are cases of non-synonymy “which fall somewhere between situational equivalence and cultural analogy” (2012, p. 46, 47, 48). There are also certain procedures which appear listed within more than one column and/or row. Moreover, due to the highly nuanced nature of Dickins’ analysis, the labels which he uses to designate procedures, e.g. “grammatical, but semantically anomalous calque/exoticism involving

semantic extension,” may be too long and complicated for practical use in descriptive analysis. Taking a different tack, Olk (2013) does not attempt to go into such descriptive detail or demarcate such fixed boundaries (p. 352). Although he resorts to the familiar scale and, like other academics, plots procedures at regular intervals across its length, he visualizes it as a fluid spectrum running directly through two overlapping circles. Within this Venn-like diagram, each circle represents a cultural system, either source or target, and the overlapping space symbolizes ‘common ground.’ Plotted along either side of the spectrum are CSI translation procedures, beneath, and their consequent ‘text procedures,’ or culturally-defined textual effect, above, ranging from exoticism (i.e. foreignization) to cultural transplantation (i.e. domestication). What makes Olk’s model unique is this acknowledgement of a generous common ground and the fluidity of interpretation it accommodates. Visually, this is illustrated by the perforated lines delimiting the ‘common ground’ between cultures, which stand out in contrast to the solid lines defining their outer bounds. This fluidity translates into greater flexibility for CSI evaluation and analysis. Whereas Aixelá definitively categorizes roughly half of his proposed procedures as strictly ‘conservative’ (or domesticating) and the other roughly half as strictly ‘substitutive’ (or foreignizing), Olk does not restrict any procedures other than those located at the two extremities to any one single effect. And his model does not concentrate on the two extremes. Instead, it allows varying blends of CSI procedures to be understood in terms of four contiguous and overlapping effects: exoticism, explained exoticism, neutralization, and cultural transplantation. Further, procedures are not analyzed individually, but in the aggregate, and their effect is determined collectively, based upon the other procedures along which they appear. As mentioned earlier, however, Olk’s main contribution to the literature is his proposed framework for comprehensive quantitative CSI analysis, of which he discovered there is a glaring scarcity. Although he admits such analysis entails considerable effort on behalf of researchers (as well as a certain degree of unavoidable subjectivity), he emphasizes that it offers multiple benefits. With such quantitative data, analysts can measure shifts in translation with respect to culture-specific lexis, gain a more global appreciation and perspective of CSI treatment in a text, and arrive at hypotheses about the translator’s “approach to the ‘cultural identity’ of the source text” (Olk, 2013, p. 355 & 353). In terms of methodology, Olk attributes a numerical value, from zero to six, to each of the seven CSI procedures along his scale and then “calculate[s] an average value representing

the mean of cultural transposition with respect to lexis” for each translated text (p. 347). He concedes that the “score system is to some extent arbitrary...and represents a substantial simplification of the highly complex nature of [CSI] translation...[For example,] it is of course impossible to say that an instance of ‘transference + explanation’ [which has a value of two] is twice as ‘exotic’ as an instance of ‘neutral explanation’ [which has a value of four]” (Olk 2003, p. 347). In retrospect, after he concludes his empirical experiment, he finds one clear shortcoming of this approach: all CSIs are statistically represented as equals and given the same weight, no matter their level of transparency or significance to the source culture or text (p. 355). Nevertheless, he maintains that the quantitative data, if “interpreted with great caution,” may reveal certain trends in translation which would otherwise remain indiscernible (Olk, 2003, p. 355).

Factors to consider

There are many factors to consider before selecting, analyzing, or evaluating a particular CSI translation strategy or procedure. Some are general and apply to most if not all translation problems and projects, while others are specific to the treatment of CSIs. General considerations include text type and genre; the purpose of the translation and the aims of its initiators; the translator’s subjective understanding of the task; the conditions under which he or she must work; his or her training and level of (in)competence; the degree to which the target language-culture is open towards others; the strength of its established stylistic conventions and translation norms; potential intervention by “authoritative agents” other than the translator or author; and finally the needs and expectations of the intended audience. With respect to CSIs in particular, Aixelá (1996) devotes significant attention to intercultural contact, pre-existing translations, and the process of canonization. Because “a potential translation problem always exists in a concrete situation between two languages and two texts,” he advises translators and researchers to first assess the “type and breadth of the intercultural gap, before the concrete contextualization of the CSI takes place, given both intertextual traditions and possible linguistic coincidences” (Aixelá, 1996, p. 68). The size and nature of the gap will determine how foreign or familiar CSIs from one culture will feel to members of another. One of the most important variables encountered in such investigations is that of time. In today’s globalized world, we are more connected than ever in human history. Contact,

communication, and travel between countries and cultures takes place in a multitude of directions and milieus each and every day. Just as physical commodities are imported from one locale to another, cultural material flows openly across most borders and circles the globe. This of course impacts the practice of translation because far-flung languages and cultures have much more in common than they once did. As intercultural contact has increased, cultural asymmetry has decreased, rendering once obscure CSIs less ‘exotic’ and more transparent abroad. Another important consideration is the possible existence of pre-established translations. “Previous translations of the same genre, author, or source text place constraints on the target text insofar as they have become a recognized part of the target language culture” (Aixelá, 1996, p. 67). In other words, if a translation has firmly entered into the literary system of a given culture, the way in which it renders CSIs among other features may not be open to alteration. On the other hand, if the translation did not gain target-culture acceptance, future translators of the same source text may not be constrained to previously adopted orientations or procedures. Therefore, the way in which pre-established translations are viewed is crucial. Yet so is the status held within the target culture by the original source text. If it has not achieved canonical status, translators may condense or even abridge the work to suit target-language conventions. However, if the text is touted as a “classic,” translators may opt for arguably more ‘conservative’ retranslation (Aixelá, 1996, p. 67). In Nedergaard-Larsen’s (1993) analysis, the discussion repeatedly returns to the finer points of individual CSIs, such as their opacity and function. Like Olk (2013) who points out that his quantitative approach unfortunately treats CSIs as quantified equals, the Danish scholar understands that CSIs are by no means equal. Thus, taking a vague measurement of some intercultural gap will not suffice: “each element will have to be considered individually...Certain culture-bound elements will be generally known abroad (for instance Sorbonne)...Others will presumably be unknown (such as HEC)...” (p. 223). She argues that the more ‘exotic’ or opaque an item is, the more explicative of a procedure may be needed. However, if a CSI is extremely opaque, even the translator themselves might not grasp its meaning (Aixelá, 1996, p. 69). Not only do CSIs vary in their transparency and accessibility, but also in their relevance and contribution to a given text. In fact, the more central an item is to the text, the more likely it will be conserved in translation (Aixelá, 1996, p. 70). In this regard, Nedergaard-Larsen (1993) focuses on the function individual CSIs—as opposed to Davies’ later CSI ‘networks’—perform in texts and outlines three possibilities, stating that these items

may contribute to either plot development, characterization, or ambiance (p. 222). For works of fiction, she considers those items which are significant for the plot to be most important. In her opinion, they should not be omitted under any circumstances, even though those which help develop a character or add a bit of local color may be sacrificed if redundant (p. 222- 223). Further, there are other pertinent factors to consider, such as CSI recurrence and textual coherence. If a CSI frequently reappears in a text, it will most likely be conserved. Yet, depending on the stylistic conventions of the target language, its treatment may or may not be analogous throughout (Aixelá, 1996, p. 70). It is also important to note that CSIs may exist already, in the source text itself, “as happens with many technical, minority, or transnational references” (Aixelá, 1996, p. 70). One such example is “those items that are related to special language uses such as dialect, informal language and slang” which are often subject to attenuation or standardization and disappear in translation (Mussche & Willems, 2010, p. 493). Also of interest is that certain source text CSIs may refer to features or elements of third cultures, even to those belonging to the culture into which the text is being translated (Aixelá, 1996, p. 69). The wide range of factors necessary to consider when analyzing a CSI and/or its translation reflect the multiple independent variables and complexity which characterize CSIs themselves. No single CSI is identical to any other, nor is any translation strategy or procedure applicable to all contexts. The present study does not seek to substantiate or disprove any framework of analysis; rather, the objective is to broaden understanding of CSIs and the factors which influence their translation.

Omission: a domesticating procedure?

Within the literature on CSIs in translation, one of the most salient topics of meticulous discussion is omission, a procedure which “is used much more than many prescriptive translation scholars would like to acknowledge” (Aixelá, 1996, p. 64). Researchers tend to agree that, as long as textual coherence is not impaired, omission of a CSI may in certain contexts be considered a satisfactory translation solution. For instance, Baker (2018) observes, “If the meaning conveyed by a particular item or expression is not vital enough to the development of the text to justify distracting the reader with lengthy explanations, translators can and often do simply omit...the word or expression in question” (p. 43).

It is imperative to point out though that “omission as a translation procedure...may have a number of different purposes” (Dickins, 2012, p. 56). And a decision to omit culture- specific references, or any other lexical items for that matter, may not be culturally-informed whatsoever (Mussche & Willems, 2010, p. 494). There is always the possibility that the translator simply “can find no adequate way of conveying the original meaning...[or] cannot interpret the original” (Davies, 2003, p. 79-80). Even if the translator does not run into such problems, he or she may elect to omit if a CSI appears ideologically unacceptable, overly obscure, or too irrelevant to justify the effort needed to ensure its comprehension (Aixelá, 1996, p. 64). Likewise, if a lengthy explanation would give the item a prominence in the target text which it did not enjoy in the source, the translator may opt to omit (Davies, 2003, p. 80). Scholars almost all recognize that omission is a useful, if not ideal, compromise procedure, yet debate continues as to the procedure’s overall effect on a text. While Aixelá (1996) and Olk (2013) both rank omission as the second most domesticating of their proposed CSI translation procedures, other scholars refute this, claiming that omission does not entail a completely domesticating effect (Aixelá, 1996, p. 64; Olk, 2013, p. 350-351). Even though Dickins (2012) classifies omission as a “domesticating” rather than “foreignising” or “culture-neutral” procedure, he identifies it as the only one exclusively oriented towards “problem-avoidance” (p. 45). Breaking past Venuti’s divide, Mussche and Willems (2010) argue that if omission does produce domestication at times, it only does so “largely in a negative sense” (p. 485). They find that it results instead more precisely in simplification and/or neutralization, which may or may not imply domestication. Rather than shifting the text further into the target cultural space, “[o]missions tends to flatten...descriptive subtleties and richness of detail in favour of...narrative development and story line” (Mussche & Willems, 2010, p. 488). This view is also held by Davies (2003) who notes, “Omission does not seem the optimal strategy for dealing with [certain] references since, used repeatedly, it destroys the texture carefully built up by the many small details” (p. 93).

Chapter 4. Research Methodology

Locating the texts

Based in Taiwan, I was able to relatively easily find available copies of collections containing the Chinese source texts, Chang’s self-translations, and alternate English translations. In fact, all were available from the National Taiwan University Library, even if Lucian Wu’s New Chinese Stories (the collection which contains Chang’s self-translation of “Deng”) was shelved in a special, rare-book section and unavailable for check-out. For the French titles, on the other hand, it took a bit more time, patience, and expense to track them down and order them from overseas. Fortunately, both titles required for this study were available on Amazon, and I was able to purchase a second-hand copy of the Bleu de Chine collection Shanghai 1920-1940, long out of print, in which appears “Attente” (the French translation of “Deng”). I had hoped to locate a copy of La Cangue d’Or (the French translation of “The Golden Cangue” or ), also published by Bleu de Chine and translated by Péchenart as part of her PhD dissertation. Even though the story does not have an alternate English translation, it is the one other Chinese story which was self-translated into English. In addition, it is by far the best-known and most celebrated of Chang’s creative exploits in English. At the time of research, however, the only copies of the French translation for sale were listed at prices of several hundred euros and thus prohibitively expensive. This thesis therefore will not discuss the translation of CSIs in “The Golden Cangue,” but this could be an interesting extension of inquiry for future research.

Researching and selecting CSIs

Once all necessary texts had been located, checked-out, purchased, and delivered, the reading process finally began. During the initial reading of the texts, I made note of potential culture-specific language, i.e. names and forms of address; references to food, religion, geography, and transport; idioms and fixed expressions; interjections; borrowed words; and dialectal forms. I started by reading each Chinese source text, and then carefully studied its corresponding English and French translations, sometimes finding potential CSIs in the target texts where none had been present in the source. Or, a few times, I discovered potential CSIs which I simply hadn’t recognized as such in the source.

Cycling back and forth between three languages and four texts for each story, this process required intense sustained concentration, especially factoring in the significant editorial changes which Chang made in self-translation. More importantly, however, this first reading laid bare the elusive nature of CSIs. While some are self-evident, others are far less unambiguous. As a result, it became apparent that, before proceeding any further with primary source materials, it was necessary to pin down precisely what factors could determine whether or not a particular item should be considered culturally-specific. Turning to supporting literature on CSI analysis and translation, I found that some authors had deftly avoided the question altogether by preemptively limiting their analysis to pre-selected, almost irrefutable (and easily identifiable) categories of CSIs, such as toponyms or names of foods and beverages. Such a selective scope of analysis, however, would not accomplish my objective of refining the understanding of culture-specific material woven into Chang’s stories or even of CSI translation. Therefore, a more inclusive, comprehensive frame of analysis would be needed, beginning with a working definition of CSIs in order to establish criteria for their in-text selection. Although there is an inevitable degree of subjectivity inherent in CSI identification and analysis, it is still possible to identify certain commonly shared characteristics. Generally speaking, CSIs are lexical items which create a translation ‘problem’ between a specific source- and target-language pair due to the absence in one (usually the target language) of a concrete object or abstract concept referred to in the other (usually the source language). Even if its referent exists in both language-cultures, the lexical item may still constitute a CSI if the concept or object to which it refers possesses different denotative, connotative, or associative values between languages. Equipped with this working definition of CSI, I returned to the primary texts for a second reading. In this process, each time I encountered a particular item which might arguably be culturally-specific, I would consider the following two questions: a. Does the source-text referent exist in the target language-culture? b. Does it bear the same denotative meaning, carry the same connotations, and trigger the same associations? If the answer to either was negative, the item was flagged as a CSI and transcribed, along with its translations, into a database of CSIs discovered in each story.

Constructing (and categorizing) the CSI corpora

As I proceeded with the second close reading of the primary texts, the CSI database for each story grew and evolved. Having read relevant literature on CSIs in translation, I was much better prepared the second time around for the task of CSI identification and analysis, but there was still a sense that the training wheels had come off perhaps a bit prematurely. It very soon became clear that identifying CSIs, as other authors had warned, was not nearly as straightforward as could be desired. In any case, I began by transcribing and compiling all potential CSIs (and their translations) into a four-column table, one column for each version, in the order in which they first appear in the Chinese source text. In this manner, a total of 196 potential CSIs were drawn from “Guihua” and 142 from “Deng.” From the very beginning of this process, however, multiple questions arose: • How should CSIs which reoccur in a single text be recorded? Should a separate entry be created in the databases for each reiteration? Recurring CSIs (by story) include: o “Guihua”: i. amah, month, “face”, doughball/problem, water chestnut, rosewood, Suzhou, husband’s family, dowry, the sky, hukou, gown, picul

o “Deng”: i. tuina massage, steamed bun, alley, Suzhou, Chongqing, mother-in-law, concubine, concubine, to take a concubine, reincarnation, Golden Light Temple, trishaw • What if a recurring CSI undergoes different treatments in translation in the same target text? Should the varying translations be grouped within a single CSI entry or separated into multiple entries differentiated by translation procedure? (In this case, often one of the procedures involved is omission.) o Ex. “Guihua”: i. > Chang: the Ninth Moon; > omitted ii. > Péchenart: sa fierté [“her pride”]; la face [“the ‘face’”]

o Ex. “Deng”: i. > Kingsbury: come to life again; omitted

ii. > Péchenart: ses petites jeunes femmes [“his young little wives”]; une concubine [“a concubine”] iii. > Péchenart: la pagode Jinguang « Lumière d’Or » [“the Jinguang ‘Golden Light’ Temple”]; la pagode Jinguang [“the Jinguang Temple”] • In some instances, a translator may add a CSI—either Chinese or Western—in the target text where none exists in the source. Should such ‘autonomously created’ target-text CSIs be recorded in the CSI corpora? o Ex. from “Guihua”: i. an old woman from the same town > Chang: an old woman, also from Soochow ii. alcohol/wine glasses > Péchenart: les verres à apéritif

o Ex. from “Deng”: i. [“Waiting”] > Chang: “Little Finger Up” (the title of the story) for which there is an explanatory footnote added: “Holding up the little finger is a gesture commonly understood to refer to a concubine.” ii. ... > Kingsbury: The commanders in Chongqing think the civil servants won’t be able to focus on their work... iii. > Péchenart: Monsieur Jiang a donné des ordres

• Some source-text CSIs represent culture-specific synonyms which designate closely related or identical cultural referents. Should these items and their translations be recorded collectively or separately? Lexically disparate but functionally similar, such synonyms (grouped by story) include: o “Guihua”: i. and [pancake] ii. and [Shanghai] iii. and [sister/friend]

o “Deng”: i. and [concubine] ii. and [alley]

• Other source-text CSIs explicitly make reference to the target culture (i.e. Anglo- Saxon, French, or a generic “Western” culture) rather than that of the source (i.e. Chinese culture). Should these source-text, target-culture CSIs be included in the final CSI translation analysis? o Ex. (Protestant) church, God, pâté • And finally, since some CSIs appear in both stories, should the corpora be combined into a single comprehensive database? o Ex. rosewood, alley, Suzhou, concubine, previous life, (form of address) young master of the house, trishaw, rickshaw, bluish-green (jade) In all likelihood, any comparative analysis of CSIs in translation will encounter similar issues, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution suitable for each and every inquiry into the phenomenon. It is the responsibility of each researcher, taking into account the particular scope, objectives, and languages of their analysis, to decide how best to record, organize, and analyze the data at their disposal. For the purposes of the present study, I elected to allot one database entry for each CSI, regardless of how many times it (re)occurs in its respective source and target texts, as long as the translations found within each individual target text match. In cases where a CSI is subject to varying treatments within a single target text, a separate database entry was created for each distinct translation procedure. Additional entries were also made for those CSIs which are inserted into target texts by the translator and lack an evident counterpart in the same location of the source, even if the same referent was designated (and conveyed) elsewhere in the same target text. Therefore, whereas the multiple, near-identical iterations of (alley/alleyways) found in “Deng” are grouped together under a single CSI entry, there are two separate entries in the “Guihua” corpus for (face), as the item receives varying treatments by individual translators. The same corpus also includes two entries for (Suzhou), one for the item as it appears in the source text and one for the reference to the city which is added by Chang to her self-translation (i.e. a moon-faced Soochow beauty). With respect to Chinese culture- specific synonyms, items such as (concubine) and (concubine) are listed and counted separately to reflect their clear lexical (if not functional) distinction.

Source-text CSIs which make reference to Western culture, on the other hand, have been excluded from analysis. The reasoning behind this decision is two-fold. First, it is almost impossible to compare how a translator renders a concept which originates within the source culture and is alien to the target audience with their rendering of a concept which, conversely, is foreign to the source culture yet conveniently already exists in—in fact has been exported by—that of the target. Secondly, the analytical framework used in this study to classify CSI translations by translation procedure is founded upon the assumption of a fixed one-way cultural transfer, from a Chinese source to a Western target. Due to the trilingual design of this study, there are two target cultures (i.e. Anglo- Saxon and French) involved, but the transmission of cultural material still flows in one direction from East to West and the two targets both receive culture-specific content from a single Chinese source. Therefore, Western CSIs which are non-native to the Chinese cultural world in which the stories were first produced will not be considered in this thesis. In spite of the cultural hybridity for which Chang’s œuvre is well-known, the decision to exclude such items from analysis only affects 10 out of the total 338 potential CSIs identified for this research and, consequently, should not have a great impact on the overall results. As for combining the corpora into one single database, this option was considered but ultimately rejected. Whereas the English self-translations and French translations for each story were individually crafted by the same two translators, the English re-translations were produced by two different translators, Simon Patton and Karen S. Kingsbury. Thus, combining the databases would collapse the distinction between these two. It would also obscure the important influence that other factors exert on the choice of overall translation orientation and strategies adopted for CSI treatment in particular. For example, the French translations—though both penned by Péchenart— were published almost two decades apart by two different publishers and handle CSIs in intriguingly different ways. Even Chang’s self-translations, which were published merely a year apart and by the same publisher, exhibit vastly different approaches to the translation of culture-specific material. Therefore, in order to maintain the distinctions between translators and texts, the corpora have not been combined and will be analyzed separately. These decisions were not reached lightly and reflect careful consideration of research design and objectives as well as familiarity with the primary sources and data collected. Before establishing the final tally of CSIs for analysis, I returned to the data itself for one more round of re-examination and organization. In this process, I struck many potential CSIs

from the list based on the determination that they were either explicitly Western (e.g. pâté), not culture-specific (e.g. cabinet), simple transliterations (e.g. whiskey), or dialectal forms (i.e. Mu-ma) incommensurate with a translation ‘problem’ as selection criteria for CSI necessitate (see table below). A further 32 items, all related to apparel, were eliminated from consideration because of the neutralization which they uniformly undergo across all English and French target texts. After weeding out those five categories of items, the remaining CSIs and their translations were regrouped as needed by shared translation procedure. In the end, out of a combined 338 potential CSIs drawn from the primary source texts, 137 items were selected for comparative analysis.

“Guihua” “Deng” Potential CSIs 196 142 - Western 5 5 - not culture-specific 101 26 - transliteration 1 12 - dialect 1 0 - clothing 10 22 CSIs 72 65

Identifying Chang’s changes to the texts

From a cursory comparison of the two source texts to their English self-translations, it is readily apparent that Chang as self-translator took significant editorial liberties with the texts. Much content is omitted, added, or altered, to the point that readers may question if they are digesting a pair of new works altogether. In light of such sweeping changes and glaring omissions, CSIs eliminated in Chang’s English translations have been subdivided into those which were singled out for omission (i.e. the surrounding text remains intact) and those taken from passages wholly obliterated in self-translation. Furthermore, the global changes undergone by the source texts are discussed in the introductions to each story.

Establishing a translation procedure framework and categorizing procedures

After organizing the data in a logical, coherent fashion, the next step was to embark on the actual analysis: to compare and contrast the methods by which the four translators handle Chinese CSIs in English and French translation. Although numerous frameworks have

been put forward by various scholars for this very purpose, none of those proposed seemed to fit the data collected or the language pairs involved. As a result, I was compelled to create a new analytical framework, tailored to the CSI data collected but building upon already existing models. I had initially been inclined to streamline and simplify such models, but soon after beginning to work with the data itself realized that discrepancies therein would disappear without a detailed system of classification. I therefore fought against my initial instincts and engaged in a lengthy process of trial-and-error involving many major and minor adjustments and multiple recategorizations until arriving at a framework for analysis adequate for my purposes. Rather than a general classification system applicable to all CSI translation and analysis, this framework should be considered a tool for describing the specific translation procedures observed in the target texts selected for the given study. It comprises nine categories of translation procedure: unlexicalized transliteration (UT); unlexicalized transliteration + explicitation (UT + EXPct); unlexicalized transliteration + explanation (UT + EXPln); semantically anomalous translation or paraphrase (SA); semantically systematic reference to the source culture (SS); culture-neutral explanation (CNE); omission (OM); cultural analogy (CA); and cultural substitution (CS). Due to the complexity of the categories, explanations of each will be provided in the following chapter.

Analyzing the data and interpreting research findings

Once all CSI translations had been categorized by procedure, it was time to analyze the global results. To do so, I adopted a quantitative approach modeled after Olk’s (2013) yet optimized for the present study. In his landmark research, Olk identifies seven procedures implemented by student and professional translators and plots them along a source-to-target- culture scale “according to their degree of cultural transposition” (p. 352). ‘Exotic’ procedures, such as ‘transference’ are plotted at the low end of the scale, while procedures which ‘transplant’ the source text into the target culture, such as ‘cultural substitution,’ are plotted at the high end. Additionally, each CSI translation in the primary corpora is attributed a numerical value of 0 to 6, depending on the procedure used. In the final analysis, Olk uses the numerical data to calculate frequency of procedure by translator group (i.e. British and German students vs. professionals), their ‘average value’ of cultural transposition, and the range found within each group.

I was very impressed by this piece of research and intrigued by the conclusions drawn, thus I set out to tailor a similar analytic tool for my own devices. Unlike the experiment described above, however, the present study analyzes translations of not one source text into a single target language but two source texts into two separate target languages. This means that, for at least Chang and Péchenart, there are two target texts under analysis produced by each translator and it is therefore possible to compare how the same translator reacts to CSI stimuli in a different context. Also, this study identifies nine procedures (rather than seven) adopted by translators as means to render CSIs. Although several roughly correspond to procedures coined by Olk, I differentiate between cultural substitution and analogy as well as semantically systematic and anomalous translations. As a result, my basic scale of source-versus-target orientation is slightly longer, running from -3 to 5. Moreover, whereas in Olk’s scale ‘substitutive’ target-oriented procedures are accorded higher values than more ‘conservative’ ones, this scale reverses those values. Normally, in translation studies, we speak of ‘translation losses’ rather than ‘translation gains.’ And translators are presented with source texts which they must chip away at in order to contrive renderings in the target language. Thus, while I respect target texts as independent, artistic creations, it still only seems natural that source-oriented procedures should be valued higher, numerically speaking, than those which eliminate source-text lexis and substitute target-culture equivalents. Thus, my scale attributes the highest values to the most source-oriented procedures (e.g. unlexicalized transliteration = 5) and reserves the lowest values for those which are most oriented to the target language and reader (e.g. cultural substitution = -3). This leads to another key difference between the two scales. Olk’s scale includes only whole numbers (i.e. 0, 1, 2,...) and runs in ascending order from source- to target-oriented procedures. Since there are far more procedures which ‘exoticize’ than domesticate, however, those which neutralize (i.e. ‘TL expression referring to the source culture,’ ‘neutral explanation,’ and ‘omission’) are bumped up towards the higher end, and are accorded values of 3 to 5. Yet in my opinion, the fact that none of Olk’s neutralizing procedures are represented by neutral numerical values appears to be a gross oversight in design. I thus have remedied this flaw, as I see it, and have given culture-neutral explanation a mathematically neutral value of 0, to represent its neutralizing effect on target texts.

Converting findings into statistics

Just like Olk, I used the aggregated data to draw conclusions, or in some cases substantiate observations, about the tendencies of different translators. To discern discrepancies in CSI strategy between texts, the translations of “Deng” and “Guihua” were analyzed separately. This also allowed me to compare Chang and Péchenart’s respective translations of each story as well as Kingsbury’s translation of “Deng” to Patton’s rendition of “Guihua.” Although “Deng” is roughly half the length of “Guihua,” its collective texts present nearly as many CSIs. While the “Guihua” corpus consists of 72 items (and 216 translations total; see Appendixes B and E), its “Deng” counterpart encompasses 65 (or 195 translations total; see Appendixes A and D). In each corpus, all target text entries were given a score based on the procedure used to render the relevant CSI. For example, if a translation was marked as unlexicalized transliteration (UT), the target text was accorded 5 points; if categorized as unlexicalized transliteration + explicitation (UT + EXPCT), the text was given 4 points; if classed as unlexicalized transliteration + explanation (UT + EXPLN), it was allotted 3 points; and so on. Following this logic, the maximum score for each full-length translation was five times the total number of CSIs, while the minimum was the negative value of three times that same amount. After all target-text entries had been categorized and attributed scores, these values were added up according to translation and divided by the total number of CSIs in order to derive the average score of each full-length text. The higher this average, the more source-oriented a translation was concluded to be; the lower the average, the more target-oriented. Following this first round of quantitative analysis, I continued to crunch numbers, interested to see how these scores and averages would shift if omission (OM) were represented as numerically neutral, in other words as equal in value to culture-neutral explanation (CNE). From the beginning, I had naturally understood that both procedures contribute to neutralization, OM albeit in an obstinately negative sense, and had wanted to grant each a neutral value. However, in order to distinguish between the two, I elected to mark OM as being situated one notch south of neutral, in acknowledgement of its entailed textual ‘loss.’ Yet, this decision should not be misconstrued as indicating that I conceive OM as more target-oriented than CNE, for that is not necessarily so. Frankly, OM is an exception, an unfortunate blemish in the framework which does not sit nicely with the other procedures lined up neatly in a row.

The second set of scores and averages (see Appendix C: Tables 1 and 2, rows B) seeks to correct the target-oriented distortion and artificial devaluation of the first (rows A), as caused by OM designating a negative rather than a neutral value. Whereas in the first instance, the scale ran from -3 to 5, this reconfiguration clipped the scale’s tail end by one integer and shifted the two foreignizing procedures, i.e. cultural substitution (CS) and cultural analogy (CA), up one point towards nil. In particular, due to their high occurrence of omission, the values representing Chang’s target texts were most notably affected by this reconfiguration. These new figures may more closely approximate the impression given to target readers than those of the first round because, unless readers are familiar with the Chinese texts themselves, they will likely not sense the omissions or deviation from the source. In the third and final round of quantitative analysis, I once again made concessions for omission. But this time, rather than setting OM numerically equal to CNE, I left the two procedures statistically distinct and instead excluded from analysis all source-text CSIs drawn from passages which were entirely gutted by Chang in self-translation (i.e. OM—passage; see Appendixes A and B: Tables C). This means that CSIs which were singled out for omission by Chang still counted negatively towards the overall translation scores, but CSIs which formed parts of passages wholly eliminated from Chang’s two English translations did not. Naturally, the other versions of those same CSIs were also removed from consideration. While any CSI omission may not be culturally motivated, those which are made as part of much larger textual excisions are possibly even less likely to be. Such significant edits may be made instead out of consideration for economy or redundancy. Therefore, I did not want such a crucial distinction to be lost in the data and performed one last round of calculations (see Appendix C: Tables 1 and 2, rows C). The conclusions which I have drawn from the above-described quantitative data will be presented in Chapter Six, but first it is necessary to introduce the CSI classification framework applied to said data for analysis. The following chapter will thus discuss all procedures in detail and provide illustrative examples of each from the primary sources.

Chapter 5. Framework for the Categorization of CSI Translations

Categorization of CSI translation by procedure

This thesis proposes a new framework of analysis for CSI translation. It was not created spontaneously from scratch but builds upon previous models in the literature proposed by scholars such as Aixelá (1996), Dickins (2012), and Olk (2013). This framework was conceived to describe and account for the specific variations in translation as observed in the data collected from the given primary sources. It comprises nine categories of translation procedure:

Foreignizing procedures A unlexicalized transliteration (UT) B unlexicalized transliteration + explicitation (UT + EXPCT) C unlexicalized transliteration + explanation (UT + EXPLN) D semantically anomalous translation or paraphrase (SA) E semantically systematic reference to the source culture (SS) Neutralizing procedures F culture-neutral explanation (CNE) G omission (OM) Domesticating procedures H cultural analogy (CA) I cultural substitution (CS)

Ranging across a broad spectrum—from those which are most strongly oriented towards the source language to those which are most strongly oriented toward the target language—these categories can be understood as contributing to three distinct strategies: foreignization, neutralization, and domestication. Foreignizing techniques, consisting of procedures A – E, are the most variable and numerous. These convey the cultural specificity of Chinese CSIs to a greater or lesser degree; however, they may also involve explicitation and/or explanation to ensure target reader comprehension. Neutralizing techniques are represented by procedures F and G. These result in an elimination of the Chinese-specific cultural material, either through replacement of the CSI with a culture-neutral explanation or, in other instances, through complete omission. As for domestication, this effect is achieved

by either procedure H or I, in which the source-culture CSI is substituted by a target-culture equivalent. This chapter will look at each of these procedures in depth, providing definitions and specific primary-source examples of each categorization.

Note: Primary-source examples will be presented in tri-column tables. From left to right, the first column will indicate the story from which the example is drawn (i.e. “G” for “Guihua” and “D” for “Deng”) and the translator behind each target text (i.e. “C” for Chang; “Pa” for Patton; “K” for Kingsbury; and “Pé” for Péchenart). The second or middle column will display the CSI categorization (see abbreviations above) and the third will contain the passages taken from the source and target texts. This far-right column will also present any accompanying material, i.e. footnotes and my own English renderings of the French translations. In most cases, there are alternate translations of the CSI found beneath the row painted in gray.

The translation procedures

Unlexicalized transliteration (UT)

This first procedure introduces an important distinction in the proposed system of classification: that made between language that is lexicalized (procedures D-I, barring omission) and unlexicalized (procedures A-C). This is an idea taken from Dickins (2012), who identifies lexicalization as one of the four key spectra along which CSI translation procedures can be plotted. By using the term ‘lexicalized,’ he refers to words and expressions that are commonly used or understood by the speakers of a given language. Reliably found in authoritative dictionaries, these items make up the standard basis of a given language. In comparison, ‘unlexicalized’ items do not belong to the established lexis and remain incomprehensible to all but those who possess supplemental background knowledge or are proficient in the relevant foreign language. The trouble with this distinction is that lexicalization is relative and there are many items for which the degree of lexicalization is arguable or unclear. For example, some Chinese transliterations, such as amah and picul, may be found in an English-language dictionary, but they are not necessarily recognized or understood by the majority of native English speakers. To defuse and resolve issues of subjectivity and ambiguity, I used the

online versions of Merriam-Webster and Larousse to determine whether or not a transliteration from Chinese could be considered lexicalized in English or French respectively. If the term was included in the given dictionary, it was counted as lexicalized; if not, it was classed as unlexicalized. To my surprise, out of the many examples of transliteration, there are only two which can be considered unlexicalized (and lacking explicitation or explanation) according to the above-mentioned guideline.

Example 1: UT (Chang)

D 233 C UT There is an old monk called Wu Yuan in the Temple of Golden Light in Soochow; I don’t know if you’ve heard of him... p. 79

K CNE In Suzhou, at the Golden Light Temple, there’s a monk called the All- Around Enlightened One—have you heard of him? p. 53 Pé UT + À Suzhou, il y a le vieux moine Wuyuan « Perfection de l’Éveil », à la EXPLN pagode Jinguang « Lumière d’Or », je ne sais si vous le connaissez ? p. 166 [In Suzhou, there is an old monk named Wuyuan ‘the Perfection of Enlightenment’ at the Jinguang “Golden Light” Temple. I wonder if you know of him?]

There are in fact two CSIs in this single sentence: the name of the monk and that of the temple. Both descriptive proper nouns, they are alas rendered by dissimilar procedures in Chang’s self-translation. Whereas Chang renders the name of the monk through transliteration (i.e. Wu Yuan), she resorts to direct translation for the name of the temple (i.e. the Temple of Golden Light). As a result, the semantic significance of the former will likely be lost on her English target reader, but that of the latter is conveyed with clarity. Kingsbury, on the other hand, removes all lexical traces of the original Chinese and uses direct translation for both proper nouns. As if settling on a compromise, Péchenart combines transliteration with direct translation, thereby preserving some of the original Chinese ‘flavor’ but elucidating the reference for her Francophone target readers.

Example 2: UT (Péchenart)

G ... 200 Pé UT Sur le balcon de l’appartement voisin, l’amah et ses enfants prenaient leur bouillie de riz... p. 111 [On the neighbor’s balcony, the amah was eating rice mush with her children...]

C SS The next door neighbor’s amah was eating rice gruel on the back veranda with her children. p. 5 Pa SS The amah of the apartment directly opposite took her children out onto the rear balcony to eat their congee. p. 59-60

This second example illustrates the tricky nature of lexicalization. All three translations render the source-text CSI by means of transliteration, but this one technique constitutes two different procedures in French and English, depending on the term’s level of recorded lexicalization in the language of the target text. In French, the term “amah” remains unlexicalized up until the present; yet, in English, an entry for the item is already included in Merriam-Webster: “a female servant in eastern Asia; especially a Chinese nurse.” A brief note is also mentioned about the word’s etymology. In fact, it does not come from Chinese, as might be expected from the given context; instead, it derives from the Portuguese ama for “wet nurse,” which in turn stems from the medieval Latin amma. Therefore, it can be surmised that the source-text expression survives in Chinese as a lexical borrowing itself, a relic from the era of Portuguese colonization in Eastern Asia. Regardless of the expression’s documentation, it is not clear if the average English native speaker would understand the reference, or even if Anglophones would be more likely than Francophones to comprehend the term. Further complicating this distinction is the discrepancy in the target texts’ dates of publication. Merriam-Webster notes that the English usage of “amah” dates back to 1839, but a word’s first usage in a language cannot be equated with its firmly taking root— lexicalization is a process which takes time. In 2019, it is still difficult to determine how established the term “amah” is in the English language. I am not convinced that the word has gained any currency since 1961, when Chang’s self-translation was published, or in the past decade since Kingsbury’s re-translation subsequently materialized. In any case, as this thesis is not focused on the process of interlingual lexicalization but rather on the translation of CSIs, I will not investigate this historical and etymological matter further. Lexicalization, for all target texts no matter their initial date of publication, will be determined based on the inclusion or exclusion of items from the above-mentioned dictionaries as they exist at present. In other words, lexicalization will be judged as it stands for target-text readers of 2019. But it is interesting and important to keep in mind that the borders of languages are porous. Borrowed words gain popularity and then fall out of fashion in various languages all the time.

Unlexicalized transliteration + explicitation (UT + EXPCT)

This procedure is the same as the first except that the translator adds supporting details, likely to help potential readers discern the significance of the transliteration itself. Such details do not explain the meaning of the item but provide a minimal amount of information—or verbal clues—so that readers can at least perceive its textual function. This procedure roughly corresponds to Olk’s category of “transference + explicitation,” although Olk’s concept of “transference” is much more inclusive than “transliteration” as is understood in this research. It is so inclusive, in fact, that it may not be suitable for translation between languages which rely on different graphemic systems, such as Chinese and English or Korean and Russian. According to Olk (2013), “In the case of transference the distance between [source-text] expression and [target-text] is basically zero and the source-culture identity is fully retained” (p. 348). The translator may implement “micro-procedures” to adapt the cultural reference to target-language norms, but the lexical item remains relatively untouched. For Chinese-to-English (or Chinese-to-French) translation, Olk’s idea of “transference” arguably must be pared down to transliteration, or simple romanization. At best, this tactic produces a close phonetic approximation, but pinyin cannot convey the unique fusion of pictographic, semantic, and phonetic components which represent each individual Chinese character. In addition, even though pinyin can easily be used to differentiate verbal tones, transliterations from Chinese such as those in our corpora often neglect this fundamental component. Thus, conventional pinyin transliteration, while preserving the phonetic aspect of Chinese expressions to an extent, cannot be said to “transfer” Chinese culture-specific material. Similar to the previous procedure, there are only two examples of this category found in the study data. Both drawn from Péchenart’s French translation “Attente,” each instance of this procedure is preceded in the target text by the same unlexicalized transliteration coupled with a target-language explanation. This seems to suggest that translators may adopt progressively foreignizing approaches for recurring CSIs, perhaps on the assumption that readers’ tolerance for such exoticisms increases with exposure.

Example 3: UT + EXPCT (Péchenart)

D 233

Pé UT + Je vais vous dire, à propos de ce moine de la pagode Jinguang, il est EXPCT vraiment d’une grande efficacité. p. 166 [Let me tell you, with respect to that monk at the Jinguang Temple, he is really effective.]

K CNE And let me tell you—that monk at the Golden Light Temple, he’s strong medicine. p. 54

At first glance, this French translation of [Golden Light Temple] may seem to follow the same pattern as “an old monk called Wu Yuan,” from Chang’s translation of which is noted above as an example of unlexicalized transliteration. However, since the two source-text structures are not symmetrical, comparing the target texts without reference to the source may be misleading. Although both source-text CSIs include a proper name—one designating a temple and the other a monk—the character which signifies “temple” forms part of the edifice’s proper name, while [old monk] is simply the common noun adjoining the monk’s religious name. It is this religious name “Wu Yuan” which alone encompasses the complete CSI. Thus, the surrounding text, conveniently rendered into English by direct translation, does not amount to any sort of explicitation or explanation. It is grammatically distinct from the ‘problematic’ CSI and is therefore not considered in the categorization. “La pagode Jinguang” [the Jinguang Temple], on the other hand, is a full and discrete translation of an individual CSI. In this instance, Péchenart adopts a mixed-method approach, romanizing the temple’s name, yet translating the character directly as “la pagode” [temple]. In so doing, she preserves a good portion of the Chinese original’s phonetic form, but uses the direct translation of (“la pagode”) to communicate to target readers that the exotic “Jinguang” transliteration denotes a place of worship. This is an explicitating rather than elucidating technique. “La pagode” does not clarify the accompanying “Jinguang”; instead, it simply informs the reader what “Jinguang” refers to and clues him or her into its Buddhist orientation. As previously noted, Péchenart uses a different procedure when this same CSI appears earlier in the text:

D 233 Pé UT + À Suzhou, il y a le vieux moine Wuyuan « Perfection de l’Éveil », à la EXPLN pagode Jinguang « Lumière d’Or », je ne sais si vous le connaissez ? p. 166

[In Suzhou, there is an old monk named Wuyuan “the Perfection of Enlightenment” at the Jinguang “Golden Light” Temple. I wonder if you know of him?]

In this first instance, she adds a direct translation of (« Lumière d’Or ») which is not repeated in the second. Perhaps she doesn’t find the meaning especially relevant to the text or its plot development; or maybe she expects readers to remember the denotation. In any case, it’s significant that she subsequently chooses to discard the semantic explanation but preserve the foreignizing unlexicalized transliteration.

Example 4: UT + EXPCT (Péchenart)

D ... ... 233 Pé UT + ...parce qu’il y a eu trop de morts dans la population chinoise, monsieur EXPCT Jiang a donné des ordres, et maintenant, quand les hommes prennent une concubine, on ne les appelle plus ainsi, mais « seconde épouse »... p. 165 [...because there have been too many deaths in the Chinese population, Mr. Jiang has given orders, and now, when men take a concubine, they are no longer called that but rather “second wife”...]

C CNE On account of the war—China losing too much population in the war—Our government there ‘inside’ has issued an order: marry a second time! p. 78- 79 K CNE Up in the interior they’ve issued a new order: since too many Chinese have died in the war, the men can marry again, and they aren’t even called concubines—they’re second wives! p.53

This second example is an instance of what Aixelá (1996) refers to as “autonomous creation,” by which translators “decide that it could be interesting for their readers to put in some nonexistent cultural reference [as if it were found] in the source text” (p. 64). Though at times references may be added on a whim or arbitrarily, this example from Péchenart’s translation may not be as carelessly inserted as Aixelá’s explanation suggests. While she is the only translator who specifically adds a CSI here, 60 she is not alone in adding something to this location as it appears in the Chinese source text. All three translators add a grammatical subject, whether “our government there ‘inside,’” “they,” or “monsieur Jiang”

60 In an earlier (1957) version of Chang’s “Little Finger Up,” two references to “Mr. Jiang” are added along with a footnote to specify that he was president of the Republic of China. In that rendition, he is indicated as the initiator of the order; yet, neither the references to Jiang nor the footnote appear in the 1961 text. It is likely that Péchenart consulted both versions of Chang’s text while working on her own translation into French.

[Mr. Jiang]. This sort of syntactical element is negotiable in Chinese because the subject of a verb is often understood and left implicit, but in English and French it’s almost a requisite. To ascertain why Péchenart chose a subject which is comparatively marked and explicit, it may help to investigate her previous insertion of this CSI and the context in which it is situated:

D 227 C CNE ...somebody inside there has issued an order—tells them to marry! p. 71 Pé UT + Monsieur Jiang* a donné des ordres, pour qu’ils puissent convoler—on les EXPLN y a incités ! [Mr. Jiang issued orders allowing them to remarry—they’re encouraged to!] Note : Jiang Jieshi : Tchang Kaishek p. 158

In the Chinese source text, with respect to the individual who gave the order, only a vague indication of someone ‘higher up’ is given. Péchenart, nonetheless, specifies that that person is none other than the controversial figure Chiang Kai-shek, who was leading the War of Resistance against the Japanese at the time in which “Deng” is set. Péchenart also adds a footnote for emphasis and provides two separate romanizations of the Generalissimo’s Chinese name, indirectly illustrating the imprecision and inherent insufficiency of transliteration.

Unlexicalized transliteration + explanation (UT + EXPLN)

This third procedure is the last of the series whose categorizations hinge on the presence of an unlexicalized transliteration. Much more target-reader-friendly than the previous two, this less foreignizing procedure retains the CSI’s phonetic component yet provides an illuminating explanation of its meaning and/or implications. Like other scholars, Aixelá (1996) terms such explanations “glosses” and distinguishes two types found in target texts. Intratextual glosses, the less intrusive of the two, are included as “indistinct part[s] of the text...so as not to disturb the reader’s attention” (p. 62). Some intratextual glosses are so inconspicuous that readers may not even notice that an explanatory element has been added. Extratextual glosses, on the other hand, are much more visible. These include different types of body and back matter, such as footnotes, endnotes, and index entries, but also in-text clarifications distinguished by italics, quotation marks, and parentheses.

I am not convinced of the utility of Aixelá’s (1996) intra-/extra-textual distinction. Rather, I see potential in Olk’s (2013) differentiation between explicitation and explanation, which is based on textual function rather than location or punctuation. Nevertheless, at least for the data on hand and the categories involving transliteration, the two distinctions result in the same classifications. While both previously discussed instances of UT + EXPCT, i.e. “la pagode Jinguang” and “monsieur Jiang,” would likely be classed by Aixelá as “intratextual gloss,” all examples of UT + EXPLN would, inversely, be considered “extratextual gloss.” Whichever labels one prefers—intra- and extra-textual gloss or explicitation and explanation—there are only two examples in the data of the former but far more, a total of fifteen, of the latter. All instances of UT + explicitation are taken from two single renditions of “Deng,” specifically Chang and Péchenart’s translations. Although these two translators both frequently resort to this procedure, they rely on different forms of explanation. Chang seems to prefer in-text glosses, italicizing the transliteration and adding a paraphrase or direct translation indiscreetly and immediately before or after. In contrast, Péchenart makes extensive use of extra-textual matter, appending lengthy footnotes and index entries to her target text. To source-language readers, such strategies would likely seem redundant, but for the average target-text reader they may be useful and informative. In fact, out of the nine procedures which comprise the proposed framework, UT + EXPLN may be the most enlightening and instructive.

Example 5: UT + EXPLN (Chang & Péchenart)

D 233 C UT + A fortuneteller told me long ago: he said I’m the incarnation of Ti Tsang EXPLN Wang pu-sa, the Earth God, and my husband is the incarnation of the star of Tien Kou, the Dog of Heaven, and the two are deadly enemies. That’s why we’ll come to no good end. p. 79 Pé UT + Autrefois, deux diseurs de bonne aventure me l’avaient bien prédit, il y a EXPLN longtemps déjà, ils disaient que j’étais la réincarnation du bodhisattva Trésor de la Terre, et que lui était celle du Chien Céleste*, deux ennemis mortels, et que ça ne pouvait rien donner de bon. p. 165-166 [In the past, two fortune-tellers predicted it. Long, long ago, they said that I was the reincarnation of the bodhisattva Treasure of the Earth and that he was that of the Heavenly Dog,* two mortal enemies, and that it could lead nowhere good.] Note : Le bodhisattva Ksitigarbha « Trésor de la Terre » est une divinité boudhiste, intercesseur compatissant auprès des âmes dans le cycle de leurs existences ; le Chien Céleste, qui incarne l’étoile du même nom, de

mauvais augure, est réputé pour son caractère vindicatif. Leurs traits distinctifs, ainsi que leurs caractères « terrestre » et « céleste », en font des personnages antinomiques. 165 [Note: The bodhisattva Ksitigarbha “Treasure of the Earth” is a Buddhist deity, who intervenes with compassion on behalf of souls as they cycle through their existences; the Heavenly Dog, who embodies the star of the same name, is an omen of bad fortune well-known for his vindictive disposition. Their distinctive qualities, as well as their “terrestrial” and “celestial” natures, produce contradictory and antithetical figures.]

K SS A fortune-teller once told me that I’m the Womb of the Earth Bodhisattva come to life again, my husband’s the Dog Star—we’re vengeful lovers locked in mortal combat, no good end in sight. p. 53

This source-text sentence is rich in culture-specific material, injecting not one potential CSI into the story but three, namely the notion of (re)incarnation and the names of two Buddhist deities. In this particular example, even though Chang and Péchenart adopt different approaches, both produce a translation which can be categorized as UT + EXPLN. Hopefully, this short discussion of the target texts will illustrate how difficult it is to categorize translations by procedure and how, at times, divergent renderings may wind up categorized together. For the names of the two deities, Chang resorts to partially-italicized transliteration combined with simple if somewhat foreign-sounding explanation. Péchenart, on the other hand, renders both deities’ names by their semantically systematic (SS) and established translations. To the first she adds “bodhisattva,” a term derived from Sanskrit but which is lexicalized in French. Yet, what would otherwise amount to a clear-cut case of SS translation is foreignized by its lengthy footnote, in which Péchenart adds the first divinity’s formal name, or rather its unlexicalized liturgical Sanskrit romanization. She also caters to her target readers by describing the role the two deities play in the Buddhist religion. This brings up an important decision made in the midst of the multi-round process of CSI categorization. Faced with explanatory footnotes and other types of extratextual supplements, I considered whether or not to take these into consideration when assigning classifications. Of course, some readers may disregard supplemental notes, but others may read them closely, and it is difficult to judge how such material will affect the reader’s perspective or overall reaction to the translation. Therefore, with so many undefined factors, I decided to treat all textual matter equally and to take into account all supplemental information during CSI categorization.

Unlike Chang and Péchenart, Kingsbury translates this first Buddhist reference in a much less foreignizing manner, with its established English translation. For the name of the second deity, Kingsbury selects an even more neutral option, albeit somewhat ambiguous. While the “Dog Star” can plausibly carry Buddhist overtones, it is also another name for “Sirius,” derived from Greek and designating the brightest star in the nighttime sky. Kingsbury also takes a comparatively more moderate approach in her rendering of [reincarnation]. Whereas the other two translators retain the explicit source-text reference to the well-known Buddhist concept, even if Péchenart later reduces it to a demonstrative pronoun (i.e. celle), Kingsbury significantly attenuates the item, replacing it with the more colloquial expression “come to life again.” Clearly, categorization is not a simple, straightforward process. A review of multiple CSIs in the same sentence translated by three individuals into two different target languages is complex and requires time and thought.

Example 6: UT + EXPLN (Chang)

D ...234 C UT + Short-legged and pot-bellied and with her open face painted pink and white, EXPLN she looked like a little boy in old Chinese paintings, any one of the hundred boys in the traditional pai tze tu, the pictures of one hundred sons. p. 81

Pé SS ...madame Tong ressemblait, avec ses jambes courtes et son gros ventre, ses joues roses et sa bonne mine, aux petits garçons de la Chine ancienne, dans les images « aux cent fils »*. p. 168 [...Mrs. Tong, with her short legs and her large stomach, her rosy cheeks and her healthy complexion, resembled the little boys from the China of old, pictured in those paintings called “To the Hundred Sons.”] Note : Estampes porte-bonheur, offertes aux nouveaux foyers pour leur souhaiter la fécondité. 168 [Note : Prints given to newlywed couples as talismans to wish them luck in fertility.] K CNE Her short, pot-bellied figure and full face, daubed with red and white makeup, made her look like an old-time Chinese boy, like the ones in those paintings on the theme ‘A Hundred Sons’. p. 55

Fortunately, this second example is a bit more manageable. Chang is the only translator to preserve the CSI in unlexicalized transliteration (i.e. pai tze tu). She may have been wary of confusing target readers, however, because she adds an explanatory gloss both before and after the romanization. As a result, her target text reads a bit repetitive. Péchenart chooses to translate the item directly instead. Conscious of the intercultural gap, she further inserts an elucidating footnote so that the significance of the reference will

not be lost on her readers. This information may appear superfluous, but it adds substance to Péchenart’s translation and draws attention to an overarching theme developed in the source. This footnote also distinguishes the French target text from Kingsbury’s English translation. Within the body of the text, Kingsbury treats the reference in a manner equivalent to Péchenart; however, she does not add any supporting explanation for the reader. Therefore, all three renderings of this particular CSI represent a different translation procedure.

Semantically anomalous translation or paraphrase (SA)

This fourth procedure marks an important shift from approaches that result in unlexicalized language to those that generate text which is much more familiar and lexicalized. Paradoxically, though, standard, ‘regular’ language may be used in non-standard, unconventional ways. This leads us to another of Dickins’ (2012) distinctions, that of expression which is semantically systematic as opposed to that which is semantically anomalous. Because unlexicalized forms can have no fixed meaning in a given language and are thus by definition semantically anomalous, this distinction is not relevant to procedures A through C, which all involve UT. Lexicalized forms, for that matter, may sometimes be used to communicate meanings or connotations which do not correspond to their dictionary-established denotations. It is for this latter case, precisely, that I coined the SA procedure. Indeed, it is one of the more commonly observed procedures in the study data. It is used by each translator and within all target texts.

Example 7: SA (Péchenart)

G ...... 210 Pé SA ...Ah Hsiao, qui n’avait pas épousé son mari « sous les chandelles ornées » des justes noces... p. 130 [...Ah Hsiao, who had not married her husband “under the decorated candles” of a proper wedding...]

C CNE ...Ah Nee, who was not married to her husband. p. 9 Pé CNE She and her husband had not had a proper marriage ceremony. p. 73

This example, like many others, presents a multi-pronged approach. Péchenart directly translates the source-text CSI, leaving it in quotation marks as it appears in the

source . Yet she also adds the preposition sous [under] along with an intratextual gloss, likely in an effort to convey the reference’s connotations which would otherwise be completely lost. Even though on the surface this seems to preserve the semantic load of the CSI, the translation may in fact alter its deeper implications. In Chinese, refers to ornamental candles which are traditionally placed in a newlywed couple’s bedroom, and the expression can be used to figuratively allude to the act of consummating a marriage. Péchenart’s translation, however, seems to focus on the wedding ceremony itself rather than the intimate wedding night. In any case, if there were no gloss for clarification, les chandelles ornées would not relay any significant figurative meaning. This is an example, therefore, of a semantically anomalous usage of lexicalized language. The strategy Péchenart adopts for this particular “Guihua” CSI seems at variance with her overall approach to the translation of “Deng.” In her rendition, there are a total of six elucidating footnotes which provide information about various cultural, historical, and geographical references, including tuina massages, Chiang Kai-shek, Suzhou, Buddhist gods, and fertility charms. In “Ah Hsiao est triste,” however, there is only one, which is found underneath and discusses the story’s title and epigraph. It leads one to wonder why Péchenart appended half a dozen footnotes to one translation but almost none to the other, and furthermore, whether she would have inserted one for this CSI had it appeared in “Deng” instead of “Guihua.” As for the alternate translations, both dilute the cultural identity of this CSI, replacing the item with culture-neutral explanations. Patton’s translation is very concise, while Chang’s is paradoxical enough to make you stop and read twice.

Example 8: SA (Chang & Kingsbury)

D 234 C SA Then afterwards he wasn’t scared any more...Made his rounds in the singsong houses and took them home, one woman after another. p. 80 K SA But after he stopped being afraid of me, he ran around to sing-song girls, and even brought women home with him. p. 54

Pé CNE ...alors par la suite il a cessé de me craindre, c’étaient des allées et venues dans les maisons closes, il a ramené des femmes chez nous, les unes après les autres. p. 167 [...but later he stopped being afraid of me, there were comings and goings in and out of brothels, he brought women back home, one after the other.]

In this case, the source-text item [brothel] is not semantically problematic. Rather, it is the fact that it is a Wu dialectal form carrying geographical connotations which complicates translation. The word is one of several, e.g. [then] and [so], taken from dialogue within “Deng” that situate the story specifically in the region of Shanghai, while also embellishing the characterization, most notably of the relatively countrified Mrs. Tong. To render this CSI, the two English target texts opt for a veiled transliteration of a related expression and present a clearly lexicalized term used in a semantically anomalous way. According to Merriam-Webster, the standard—and only—definition of the adjective “singsong” is “having a monotonous cadence or rhythm.” This definition, however, does not sanction either of the collocations found in Chang and Kingsbury’s target texts (i.e. singsong house and sing-song girls). Nevertheless, if we research further, we find that “sing-song girls” is the English euphemism for Chinese courtesans. The origin of the expression dates back to China’s pre-Republican days, when Westerners in Shanghai observed these female entertainers at work, singing for potential lovers and husbands. The expatriates heard them spoken of as [xian-sheng] which, when pronounced in the local Wu dialect, sounded roughly akin to “singsong,” and thus the establishment of the coincidentally homophonic and appropriate phrase. For anyone familiar with Chang’s work, this term immediately calls to mind an important project from the author’s later years, her translation of Han Bangqing’s The Sing- song Girls of Shanghai. Written in the Wu vernacular, the courtesan novel was translated by Chang first into Mandarin and then into English. Of course, the connection between this CSI and the Han text runs deeper than one single word or motif. Both stories under analysis in this thesis are set in Shanghai and feature characters who, like Han’s, speak not in Mandarin but in variations of Wu Chinese. Although the English texts both draw attention to this item with their semantically anomalous renderings, Péchenart opts for a much less marked culture-neutral translation. Even so, she evidently feels it necessary to acknowledge the ‘local flavor’ such dialectal forms contribute to the story. Writing of Mrs. Tong, the character who verbalizes this CSI, Péchenart includes a footnote early on: “Suzhou est sa ville d’origine, son langage est émaillé d’expressions dialectales” [She comes from Suzhou, her speech is peppered with dialectal expressions.] (p. 162).

Semantically systematic reference to the source culture (SS)

Similar to SA, the SS procedure yields source-culture references which are lexicalized in the target language; yet, the ‘foreign’ feel of SS target texts is not induced by atypical collocations or irregular grammar—they are not semantically anomalous in any way. Unlike SA translations which contravene target-language norms, SS translations do not flout grammatical rules or deviate from standard lexical usage. Rather, they adhere to those target- language norms and meet the presumed needs and expectations of target readers. In practical terms, this means that a reliable dictionary may not be able to account for various rule- bending SA target texts but should suffice to dispel any confusion surrounding SS translations. In the present CSI corpora, the SS procedure was the second most commonly identified, representing one-fifth of all translations analyzed.

Example 9: SS (Kingsbury)

D ... 230 K SS Mrs Bao was quite ugly; she had a long, winter-melon face and strangely ringed, cartoon-like eyes, with a fleshy, drooping nose. p. 50

Pé CNE Madame Bao avait un visage ingrat en forme de courge, des yeux ronds de dessins animés et un nez charnu et tombant... p. 161 [Mrs. Bao had an unattractive face in the shape of a squash, round cartoonish eyes, and a fleshy, droopy nose...]

Whether or not the average Anglophone is familiar with “winter melon,” it is an established lexicalized term designating the mild-tasting vegetable cultivated and prepared throughout south and east Asia. With respect to its usage in the text, Kingsbury seems aware that her target readers may have trouble grasping the analogy drawn between the gourd and Mrs. Bao’s face. She retains the source-text CSI through (conveniently lexicalized) direct translation but adds an explicitating word—“long”—which reveals how she herself interprets the metaphor. In contrast, Péchenart dispenses with the original CSI and replaces it with its generic hyperonym, or superordinate. In other words, “winter melon” is a type of, or hyponym, of courge [squash]. The umbrella term courge encompasses all different types of melons, squashes, and gourds, both those prepared in foreign cuisines and closer to home in the Hexagone. The term thus constitutes a culture-neutral reference more accessible to

Francophone readers. Nevertheless, like Kingsbury, Péchenart accommodates her audience, adding a descriptive modifier, i.e. ingrat [unattractive], to clarify the comparison.

Example 10: SS (Chang & Péchenart)

D —... C SS And poor me—rushing about in a rickshaw in the dead of the night, bb-lung- dung, bb-lung-dung, rattling along, being jolted up and down. p. 75 Pé SS Ah quelle pitié, moi qui en pleine nuit ai dû me faire malmener dans un pousse-pousse tout cahotant. p. 162 [Ah, mercy on my soul, me who in the middle of the night had to get myself knocked around in a rickshaw bouncing all over the place.]

K CNE Oh, it was awful! Riding in a pedicab at night—bumpity-thump, bumpity- thump... p. 50

Target readers in the West may never have seen rickshaws or pousse-pousses, but they are likely acquainted with pedicabs, which traverse the streets of big cities around the world transporting citizens and tourists alike. If we consult the dictionary to differentiate between the English synonyms, we discover that while pedicabs and rickshaws are both man- powered vehicles, a pedicab, as its prefix pedi- implies, is driven by someone pedaling some sort of cycle, while a rickshaw may be either drawn by cycle or pulled by someone on foot. Furthermore, unlike “pedicab,” “rickshaw” as a vehicle and word has Eastern derivations. Merriam-Webster indicates that the term denotes such vehicles as are used in Asian countries today and which first originated in Japan, where they acquired their name jinrikisha, later Anglicized to “rickshaw.” Similarly, the French pousse-pousse designates such vehicles which have long been in use throughout East Asia, typically those which are pushed or pulled as opposed to those driven by cycle. The French name literally translates to “push, push” and dates back to a time when rickshaw runners didn’t pull the cart from the front, but rather pushed it from behind (Pousse-pousse). Therefore, pousse-pousse is distinct from “pedicab” and synonymous with “rickshaw.” As the definitions for these items both contain references to Asia, Chang and Péchenart’s translations are each classed as the products of SS procedures. In contrast, since “pedicab” connotes no particular geographic region or cultural origin, Kingsbury’s solution is classed as culture-neutral.

Culture -neutral explanation (CNE)

This procedure marks the intersection of source- and target-oriented approaches. Up to this point, all procedures discussed (A-E) have been targeted, to a gradually diminishing degree, towards the source text, language, and reader. And following the two procedures of neutralization (F and G), all will be aimed more and more explicitly towards those of the target. At this medial point, however, the translator has found a balance between the relentless push and pull towards the two extremes. In this state of equilibrium, translations feel as though they belong to neither source nor target, but rather are appropriate and understood equally in both, perhaps even universally. Within the study data, the CNE procedure is by far the most commonly adopted by all English and French translators. It roughly corresponds to Olk’s “neutral explanation,” in which “lexical and conceptual ‘foreign-ness’ [is] largely removed from the text and, hence, all local colour lost” (2013, p. 350). While CNE target texts sacrifice their source-culture specificity, they offer in its place target-language readability. In other words, although this strategy could be interpreted as willfully stripping the identity of the source text or author, it facilitates comprehension among the target audience and thus has the potential to enhance the target reading experience.

Example 11: CNE (Chang and Péchenart)

G 201 C CNE She lifted the lid off the big brown water jar embossed with pale yellow dragons... p. 5 Pé CNE Depuis le début de la guerre, l’eau courante était rationnée et tous les foyers étaient équipés de ce genre de cuve, avec un dragon jaune pâle peint sur ses larges flancs brun-jaune. p. 113 [From the beginning of the war, running water had been rationed and all households were equipped with this type of tank, with a pale yellow dragon painted down its broad yellow-brown flanks.]

Pa SS Since it was wartime, restrictions applied to the supply of water. Every household had a vat like this one, large and soy-sauce-brown with a pale yellow dragon painted on it. p. 61

In the same vein as “olive green,” “blood red,” “sky blue,” or “ink black,” the source- text CSI in this case refers to a color described by Chang as “sauce yellow.” This hue is open to cultural interpretation, though, because sauces from different cuisines can manifest colors across the whole rainbow. Chang herself renders the item as a very neutral “brown,”

from which we can infer that the Chinese “sauce” in question is soy or something similarly chocolate-colored. In French, Péchenart also neutralizes the CSI, but she doesn’t simplify the metaphor into one color or hue. Instead, she replaces the figurative component with the color brun [brown] and preserves the two-tone description (i.e. brun-jaune). Péchenart may have taken the cue for this color from Chang because it is clear from a footnote in another collection61 that she consulted English translations of the same titles when working on her own. Patton, on the other hand, takes a different approach. Whereas Chang and Péchenart both discard the original “sauce,” Patton latches on to this idea and uses it as his target text base. Taking an intuitive leap, his translation adds a modifying “soy” and changes the original [yellow] to a rich, solid “brown.” Due to the specification that the sauce is none other than soy, a condiment which is inarguably East Asian, Patton’s target text unlike the other two is categorized as SS.

Example 12: CNE (Patton & Péchenart)

G 219 Pa CNE It’s raining. I can’t take him back with me, I’m afraid the child will slip over in the wet. He catches cold easily, too. He’s better off spending the night here with his auntie. p. 86-87 Pé CNE Il pleut, je ne le ramène pas avec moi, j’ai peur qu’il glisse, d’ailleurs il trouve toujours moyen de s’enrhumer, alors il va rester dormir avec vous cette nuit ! p. 152 [It’s raining, I won’t take him back with me, I’m afraid that he’ll slip and fall; plus, he always finds a way to catch cold, so he is going to stay here and sleep with you tonight!]

C OM It’s raining, I won’t take him home. He might slip and fall and he’s always catching cold. Let him spend the night with Aunt. p. 15

An example of ‘humble language’ () deriving from the Confucian tradition, [little man] is a self-deprecating pronoun used to express modesty while speaking in the first person. Unsurprisingly, this CSI is not preserved in translation because there is simply no equivalent in either English or French. Chang strategically circumvents the problem by eliminating the sentence’s main subject and verb, shifting the focus away from the speaker and towards the third person. Her

61 Chang, E. (2008). Lust, caution (Amour, luxure, trahison). (E. Péchenart, Trans.). Paris: Robert Laffont.

translation is accordingly classed as omission. In contrast, Patton and Péchenart take a different tack. They each neutralize the item by replacing it with the first-person pronoun appropriate to the respective target language.

Omission (OM)

This procedure is possibly the thorniest in the batch. In the past, it was considered by some, such as Aixelá (1996), to result in substitution, otherwise known as domestication; yet others, including Olk (2013) and Dickins (2012), have more recently acknowledged its ambiguous effect on the translation. Olk identifies omission “as another procedure that neutralizes the cultural identity of the text” (2013, p. 351). Nevertheless, he adds, “Where the source text features an element that locates the text in a specific culture the target text chooses to say nothing, rendering the target text closer to the target-culture readers’ perspective.” This presents a paradox, leading one to question how omission can move the text closer to the target reader if the procedure truly is neutralizing. Possibly in anticipation of this challenge, Olk emphasizes the flexibility of his framework. He does not limit his CSI categorization to a superficial analysis, but rather zooms out to take in multiple interacting levels of cultural procedures and effects. Olk sees his seven distinct “cultural reference (CR) procedures” as contributing or belonging to four broadly-defined and overlapping textual effects (which he a bit repetitively and confusingly terms “text procedures”). According to Olk’s model, the CR procedure of omission belongs, problematically, to the two text procedures “neutralization” and “cultural transplantation.” Furthermore, as illustrated in Olk’s Venn-like diagram, omission as a CR procedure is not located within the “common ground” between source and target cultural spaces; rather, it fits squarely within target culture territory. Dickins (2012) would seem to agree. His multidimensional schema represents omission not as culture-neutral but instead as domesticating. Specifically, it is the only procedure which is neither “synonymy-oriented” nor “non-synonymy-oriented,” meaning it does not involve finding a synonym or otherwise. Alternatively, it is designated as “problem- avoidance-oriented.” Dickins explains, “by not attempting to find any equivalent for the Source Text word or phrase, the problem of what an appropriate equivalence might be is avoided” (p. 47). However, this explanation seems to be missing a justification. While it is true that omission can sidestep potential issues in translation, like Olk, Dickins does not provide his rationale behind considering it as a form of domestication.

From my point of view, omission is neither domesticating nor foreignizing. It neither moves a target text closer to the target reader, nor moves the text back towards the source. It is fundamentally a neutralizing procedure which simply excises source-text material. Admittedly, this may affect the text’s overall perceived degree of ‘foreign-ness,’ but only indirectly so. As Mussche & Willems (2010) note, omission “contribute[s] to a significant simplification of the text” more than anything else (p. 485). It does not bring a CSI into any cultural space—it serves only to eliminate.

Example 13: OM (Kingsbury & Péchenart)

D 234 K OM When you grow up and get married, you’ll have to invite him to your wedding! p. 55 Pé OM Le jour où tu te marieras, il faudra inviter monsieur Pang à prendre le vin d’honneur. p. 167 [The day that you get married, you will have to invite Mr. Pang to the reception.]

In this example, a young boy’s nanny refers to the child one day marrying a , a woman who would then become the “young lady of the house...[the] wife of the young master.” As the words “lady” and “master” suggest, especially when uttered by a member of household staff, the term is by no means egalitarian or impartial. It denotes a woman of high social standing qualified by chastity, morality, and pedigree to marry into a family as equally upper-class as her own. Although Kingsbury and Péchenart rarely omit CSIs, they both select to omit this item. They in turn replace the gender-dependent verb [to take] (as in “to take a wife”) with variations on the more neutral “marry,” which can be used intransitively (or reflexively, in the case of the French se marier) such that no grammatical object is required. The CSI ‘problem’ is thus resolved. Chang, on the other hand, eliminates not only the CSI, but also the scene from which this passage is extracted and even the characters involved. Nevertheless, this is not the only CSI of its kind to appear in the study data. Both stories under analysis feature a [young master] character, the male counterpart to a [wife of the young master]. To convey this distinct but closely related CSI, most translators find culture-neutral expressions, such as jeune aristocrate [young aristocrat] and a young man of the gentry class, which uproot the item from its Chinese cultural origins but preserve the class identifier as expressed in the source. Only Chang effectively omits the CSI.

In “Shame, Amah!,” the “young master” suffers the same fate as the “young lady” above—no mention of him is made. As for the “young master” in “Little Finger Up,” Chang strips him of his upper-class status, reducing him to an unremarkable clinic patient and newcomer. She even leaves out the distinguishing detail of his expensive deerskin coat. For whatever reason, Chang seems intent to avoid conveying this sort of Chinese CSI—and this sort of character— into English for her Anglophone readers.

Example 14: OM (Chang)

D ... 230-231 C OM In the end it’s me who got him out, through my adopted daughter. Of course it cost us a lot of money. p. 75

K CNE I got him out of there all right, with my god-daughter’s help, and seven thousand dollars. p. 50 Pé CNE ...c’est encore moi qui ai trouvé le moyen de le faire sortir, en m’adressant à une de mes filles adoptives, par l’intermédiaire de qui j’ai fait passer sept mille dollars. p. 162 [...once again it was me who found the way to get him out, by going and seeing one of my adoptive daughters, through whom I was able to send seven thousand dollars.]

At first glance, this CSI may not seem culture-specific; yet, the reader’s interpretation of [kuai], or “dollar,” is dependent upon their socio-cultural perspective, not to mention their historical knowledge of the Chinese economy. Without such insight, it is impossible to understand the purchasing power of the currency, or the implications of this detail for the story. Both Kingsbury and Péchenart convey this CSI neutrally as “dollar,” which may happen to be the monetary unit in which certain Anglophone readers are accustomed to considering prices. Nevertheless, as Merriam-Webster notes, “dollar” may refer to “any of various basic monetary units,” and there are many dollars in circulation, such as those issued by the governments of Taiwan, Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, and Singapore. The US dollar may be the most widely recognized currency in the world, but the term “dollar” is not restricted to one particular country or culture. Its use in the English and French translations is therefore not domesticating or foreignizing—it is necessarily neutral. Unlike her fellow translators, Chang omits the monetary unit and the designated amount. She adopts a similar approach in three other instances in which the source texts

make reference to specific amounts of money: the $200 extra which Mrs. Tong pays to skip the clinic line is cut down to “extra”; the $100 that Miss Li tips Ah Xiao translates to “a big tip”; and the $3,000 Ah Xiao earns a month as Garter’s amah is omitted. Nonetheless, for the mention of one particular monetary amount, Chang follows a different strategy:

C SS When the pedicabs cross a bridge, the policeman collects ten dollars from each driver. p. 66 Footnote: CRB$10 in spring, 1944 was roughly equal in value to US$0.80.

This line is extracted from the dialogue between the masseur Mr. Peng and his first patient, Mr. Kao. The former is telling his client of the corrupt practices of local police, who have begun extorting money from pedicab drivers. In this case, Chang—like Kingsbury and Péchenart—retains the reference, but she adds a footnote to give readers a clearer idea of how much money this recurring bribe actually entails. To do so, she converts the amount into US dollars, but first specifies the currency to which the original reference is made. This is significant because CRB yuan were issued by the Central Reserve Bank of China, an institution founded by Wang Jingwei’s short-lived government in Nanjing. CRB yuan were only in use for a few years in the early 1940s, which tallies up with Chang’s post-university sojourn in Shanghai and the setting in which “Deng” and “Guihua” were both written. And from her footnote, we understand that the bribe extorted by police amounted to less than a single US dollar. Even in the 1960s, this would have been considered a trivial sum by most Western readers, but clearly in wartime Shanghai it was not. It is unclear why Chang chose to expand upon this one specific detail to shed light on the circumstances of Chinese life, but this strategy adds depth to her story and may elicit empathy from readers.

Cultural analogy (CA)

We now shift into the realm of domestication, to which only two procedures belong, namely cultural analogy and cultural substitution (CS). These procedures are somewhat similar because both involve replacing the source CSI with a target-language-culture equivalent. What distinguishes CA, however, is that the parallel drawn between the given source and target cultures is left exposed. Readers understand the source-culture item in terms of its target-culture analogue, but they are also aware of the translator’s intervention and the fact that they are reading his or her paraphrase of the original source reference.

At least in the present study’s corpora, this was one of the least commonly adopted procedures. There are only two examples of this strategy and both are used to render the same CSI.

Example 15: CA (Chang & Kingsbury)

D 223 C CA Mr. Peng laughed, kneaded the patient’s back harder, and recited one of those jingles of his trade, with allusions to mysterious gases, chi, and caves, hsueh, in the human body. From Mr. Peng’s lips, the words gained weight, sliding off smoothly, cool and heavy like the amber beads of a Buddhist rosary, with a lulling sense of security that belonged to a bygone age. p. 65 K CA Mr Pang chuckled. He was reciting his prescriptions, the rhythmic formulae of his art; his chanting made the words dense and heavy, like amber beads on a Buddhist rosary, with a whiff of old lady’s sitting room—an ancient, grateful peace prayer. p. 41

Pé CNE Monsieur Pang riait, récitait une enfilade de formules en vers, les heptamètres prenaient du volume dans sa bouche et tombaient comme les grains d’ambre d’un chapelet, répandant un parfum de chambre de vieille dame, une impression ancienne de paisible abandon. p. 151 [Mr. Pang laughed, and recited a series of verses, the heptameters taking on volume in his mouth and falling like the amber beads of a rosary, giving off a scent of old-woman’s bedroom, an impression of peaceful, bygone abandon.]

Both Chang and Kingsbury relate the Buddhist [nianzhu; prayer beads] to the Roman Catholic rosary. However, they project this source-culture object into the target- culture world by means of the modifier “Buddhist,” in other words by analogy. In comparison, Péchenart casts off the source text’s Chinese cultural load and translates the item by the culture-neutral expression chapelet. Similar to the English rosary, the French term often carries a Catholic connotation yet can be used generically to denote prayer beads used in a variety of religious traditions.

Cultural substitution (CS)

This final procedure is the most target-oriented of the nine. Consequently, it falls at the opposite end of the spectrum from unlexicalized transliteration (UT), the most source- oriented within the framework. As Aixelá (1996) explains, in applying this procedure “[t]he translator decides to bring the CSI into the intertextual corpus felt as specific by the target language culture” (p. 63). He also notes that cultural substitution, or “naturalization” as he

dubs the procedure, is infrequently adopted in the translation of literature. Even so, it must be common enough in other genres because it is recognized almost universally by scholars as a potential strategy. It may be conferred different labels—substitution, naturalization, cultural transplantation, or replacement by cultural analogue or equivalent—yet these all boil down to roughly the same approach: “the translator transplants the cultural setting by converting a foreign reference to a target-culture one” (Olk 2013, p. 351). Dickins (2012) would categorize this procedure as “non-synonymy-oriented,” meaning “the issue of synonymy is not of focal importance” (p. 47). However, within this category, he further differentiates between procedures which yield “situationally equivalent” translations and those which produce “culturally analogous” ones. “Situationally equivalent” translations reflect a “communicative translation” procedure. This strategy entails replacing the source-text item with a standard target-language expression appropriate for the given situation, yet carrying a different denotative meaning from the source. For example, in the United States, when meeting a friend or acquaintance, people often ask one another, “How are you?” In contrast, people in Taiwan might ask, [Have you eaten?] Although the meanings of the two expressions differ, their functions are the same. Both express polite well-wishes and friendly or neighborly care and consideration. On the other hand, Dickins argues that “culturally analogous” translations result from “cultural transplantation.” He writes that this strategy is used when there is no shared “situational identity” between the source and target cultures—in other words, when the source-text situation does not exist in the target culture and there is thus no target-language equivalent to fill in the gap. However, his discussion of these circumstances is puzzling, if not completely contradictory. According to the scholar, the procedure of cultural analogy is invoked when “there is no obvious situational equivalent in the Target Text Culture”; yet, the target-text expression occupies “an analogous situation” in the target culture to that of the source in the source culture (2012, p. 48). Rather than clarify, this explanation serves only to confuse, and the distinction between “situationally equivalent” and “culturally analogous” translations is made no clearer. Even Dickins himself concedes, “There are cases which fall somewhere between” (2012, p. 48). Therefore, I do not seek to distinguish between any sort of “equivalence” or “analogy,” these being synonyms after all. Instead, with respect to instances in which a target-language equivalent is used to render a source-text CSI, this framework classifies those

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in which the translator leaves explicit the intercultural comparison drawn as cultural analogy (CA; see procedure H), and the rest as cultural substitution (CS). Although this distinction may seem trivial, it may exert a significant effect on the target reader’s experience. By maintaining a visible connection to the source, CA translations offer target readers an opportunity to discern threads of cultural similarity, but CS translations critically do not. The CS procedure yields translations which flow seamlessly into the target language and text, such that, the reader—assuming that he or she is starting from a target-culture perspective— will likely not even perceive that an element from the target culture has substituted something from that of the source.

Example 16: CS (Péchenart)

D 234 Pé CS Autrefois quand j’avais à m’occuper de ses affaires, il me craignait comme la peste... p. 167 [Before, when I had to look after him, he feared me like the plague...]

C UT + Before that I used to keep him in check, and he was as terrified at the sight EXPLN of me as if I were a Hsueh Ti Tze.* p. 80 Footnote: The Hsueh Ti Tze were a band of trained assassins credited with superhuman powers, with whose aid the Emperor Yung Cheng had eliminated all his rivals to the throne. Mrs. Ho was familiar with their exploits as she had seen the serialized Peking opera “Hsueh Ti Tze” which had been running for years. K CNE Before, I had such a grip on him that he thought I was one of the emperor’s trained assassins, swooping in with magical powers—he was that afraid of me. p. 54

Before we proceed to Péchenart’s CS rendering, it may be helpful to first understand how this source-text CSI is treated by others. In this example, the source text refers to , or “Hsueh Ti Tze” as the term is transliterated by Chang. As self-translator, she preserves the reference in-text solely by means of the unlexicalized transliteration, but she also inserts an elucidating footnote. This extratextual gloss—likely much appreciated by her target readers—not only provides historical background information, but also highlights the significance of this CSI for the character of Mrs. Ho. In contrast, Kingsbury discards the lexical structure of the original reference yet retains its semantic load. Her culture-neutral explanation may sound somewhat fantastic, but it is neither explicitly Chinese, Anglo-Saxon, Western, or otherwise.

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Unlike Chang and Kingsbury, Péchenart completely eliminates the source-text reference and replaces it with an idiomatic target-language expression, craindre comme la peste. Consulting Larousse, we find that peste [the plague, as in the “Bubonic plague”] is commonly used in the formulations fuir quelqu’un comme la peste [to avoid someone like the plague, or at all costs] and se méfier de quelqu’un comme la peste [to highly distrust someone, as if they will bring a curse]. Yet other references, such as the online dictionary on the site of L’Obs, list craindre comme la peste as a standard, fully-recognized expression, which justifies the classification of Péchenart’s translation as CS. She has brought the reference fully into the French target culture; in fact, her rendering all but deletes the source- text CSI.

Example 17: CS (Chang)

G 215 C CS The little room she and Shin Fa lived in was like an oven. 12-13

Pa CNE The room she shared with Baishun was like a steam-cooker. 81 Pé CNE Le cagibi d’entresol où elle logeait avec Pai-shun faisait vraiment penser à un panier à étuve. [The tiny mezzanine room where she and Pai-shun stayed truly brought to mind a steam-basket.]

This final example, taken from “Guihua,” presents another interesting idiomatic twist. When Ah Xiao imagines her husband coming for a much belated coital visit, she flinches at the thought of the stifling heat. In Chinese, the source text compares Ah Xiao’s hot, humid, and cramped room to a bamboo steamer basket. Patton and Péchenart accordingly translate this metaphor to “a steam-cooker” and panier à étuve [a steam-basket]. Their translations are each classed as culture-neutral because steam-cookers—unlike bamboo steamers—are neither Eastern nor Western appliances; they are called upon in culinary traditions from around the world. It must be noted, however, that panier à étuve [steam-basket], is not the standard designation. Depending on the materials, specifications, and applications of the steamer, in French we typically speak of either panier à étuver or panier vapeur. In any case, Chang’s translation takes a different course. She brings the source-text CSI into the Anglophone cultural world by replacing [bamboo steamer] with “an oven.” This is quite interesting because Chinese cuisine historically does not resort to heating foods in an oven. In fact, most Chinese homes are not even equipped with one. Furthermore, Chang’s translation exploits a standard English-language idiomatic expression: “hot like an

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oven. ” It’s so natural that many readers are likely to not give the analogy a second thought; yet, it may perplex those who are familiar with Chinese cuisine and culture.

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Chapter 6. Statistical Analysis and Interpretation of Results

In the previous chapter, I laid out my proposal for a new framework of classification for CSI translation based on the primary data collected and insights gleaned from relevant theoretical sources. In this chapter, I discuss the practical application of the framework to the primary corpora of this study and provide a systematic interpretation of the statistical results. The chapter will be divided into three sections, each in response to one of the three research questions introduced at the beginning of this report, and discussion will draw on the tables found in Appendixes A, B, and C. The first two appendixes consist of three tables each, designated as (A), (B), and (C). Differentiated by treatment of omission (see Research Methodology), the tables indicate the frequencies and distributions of individual CSI procedures as observed in the target texts. In order to help the reader assimilate the numbers quickly and discern translation tendencies, I have used three tones of gray to shade those cells which represent low occurrences of the specified CSI strategy in the corresponding target text. Light gray shading indicates that there are only two identified occurrences of a CSI procedure, medium gray signifies that there is only one, and dark gray denotes that there are none. The third appendix serves to consolidate the quantitative information from Appendixes A and B. On a single page, its two constituent tables display the cultural- orientation ‘scores’ and cultural transposition ‘averages’ for all six target texts. These numerical values reflect the degree to which each translation is oriented towards the Chinese source culture or that of the Anglo- or Francophone target reader. For each translated text, three sets of values are given, representing the sums and means arrived at by the three modes of calculation (see Research Methodology). Once again, I have used shading to help facilitate comprehension, but this time I draw attention to the highest and lowest averages, shaded in dark and light gray respectively. Just as Olk (2013) points out for his own experiment, the scores and values which are derived from such calculations are by no means definitive and they should only be used to identify discrepancies in CSI strategy. He writes:

Importantly, it needs to be emphasized that this score system is to some extent arbitrary (e.g. different values could also have been attributed) and represents a substantial simplification of the highly complex nature of [CSI] translation...The calculated average scores should therefore not be seen as an exact measurement of

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mathematical precision. Rather, the scores can only indicate certain trends which need to be interpreted with great caution. (p. 347)

In comparison to Olk’s research, this thesis has several more variables at play. I have identified nine CSI procedures found across six target texts, two translated into English by the author and the rest by three literary translators into English or French. While I have tried to organize and present the raw and aggregated data as clearly and comprehensibly as possible, this chapter seeks to distill the significance from those miscellaneous passages, numbers, figures, and acronyms, and illustrate for the reader how various translators have handled CSIs overall.

1. How are CSIs handled in English and French translation? Are CSIs preserved, neutralized, or replaced with analogous target- or third-culture references?

According to the data collected, CSIs tend to be neutralized, regardless of the translator or target language involved. Without exception, across all “Deng” and “Guihua” target texts, neutralizing procedures are identified in the majority of CSI translations. Within the “Deng” corpus, out of 195 total CSI translations, 114 (58%) neutralize the source-culture reference; 76 (39%) preserve the reference; and only five (3%) replace it with a target-culture analogue. Likewise, the “Guihua” collection presents similar findings. Among the 216 total CSI translations, 143 (66%) demonstrate neutralization; 68 (31%) display preservation; and merely five (2%) involve replacement by a target-culture equivalent. (Notably, these figures remain relatively unchanged even if Chang’s large-scale omissions are excluded from consideration.) In summary, we can see that CSIs are more often than not neutralized, while a fair portion of the CSIs—roughly one-third—are preserved and only a fraction are replaced. Looking in particular at CSI preservation, there is a noticeable discrepancy in the distributions of source-oriented procedures between “Deng” and “Guihua” translations. To refresh the reader’s memory, there are five ‘foreignizing’ or source-oriented procedures; i.e. unlexicalized transliteration (UT = 5), unlexicalized transliteration + explicitation (UT + EXPCT = 4), unlexicalized transliteration + explanation (UT + EXPLN = 3), semantically anomalous translation or paraphrase (SA = 2); and semantically systematic reference to the source culture (SS = 1). Out of the 76 (39% of total) translations from “Deng” which foreignize the CSI, 58 (76%) are classified as the more moderate SS or SA, while 18 (24%)

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contain a UT and are thus significantly more extreme. In comparison, out of the 68 (31% of total) foreignizing translations taken from target texts of “Guihua,” 67 (99%) are labeled SA or SS, while there exists only a single instance of UT. In other words, not only do “Deng” target texts include a slightly greater proportion of foreignizing CSI translations, but the foreignizing procedures to which “Deng” translators have recourse (often involving UT) produce markedly more foreign translations. With respect to CSI neutralization, there is not as significant a disparity in the distribution of procedures between the “Deng” and “Guihua” corpora. As previously noted, CSIs from the “Guihua” corpus were more likely to be neutralized (66%) than those from that of “Deng” (58%). Out of the “Guihua” set’s 143 neutralizing translations, 107 (75%) entail a culture-neutral explanation (CNE = 0) while 36 (25%) involve omission (OM = -1). Comparatively, out of the 114 “Deng” renderings which yield neutralization, 93 (82%) are categorized as CNE and a less significant 21 (18%) as OM. In both cases, instances of CNE far outnumber omissions; in fact, CNE respectively accounts for nearly half of all CSI translations. If we scan Appendixes A and B, it is clear why the frequency of OM is higher in translations of “Guihua.” Chang frequently omits her own CSIs, but the other translators— who do not share the same authorial copyright as she—seem hesitant to implement this strategy. While Patton, Kingsbury, and Péchenart omit only a few CSIs per text, Chang omits 14 (22% of a total of 65) from “Deng” and 32 (44% of a total of 72) from “Guihua,” or rather nearly half of all items analyzed! And significantly, most omissions made by Chang did not encompass solely an individual CSI but entire passages. Globally speaking, however, CNE remains the most common strategy in both translation sets and is adopted in roughly half of all CSI renderings drawn from “Deng” and “Guihua” each. It is followed not too closely by the second most common procedure SS, which represents approximately a quarter of CSI translations from each corpus. Finally, OM ranks third, unless we exclude the instances in which Chang eliminated lengthy passages from the source texts (i.e. OM—passage), in which case UT + EXPLN would take third for the “Deng” set while the less target-oriented SA would claim the place for the “Guihua” texts.

2. How do individual translators render CSIs? Do Chang, Kingsbury, Patton, and Péchenart adopt similar CSI strategies?

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The data suggest a tendency among all translators to refrain from procedures strongly oriented towards the source or target culture. As regards “Deng,” translators stick to more moderate procedures such as SS, CNE, or OM, which account for more than three-quarters of CSI translations within all target texts. In particular, Kingsbury resorts to these procedures most consistently, with 62 translations out of 65 (95%) attributed to the three. While no single “Deng” translator implements all nine procedures, Chang and Péchenart seem a bit more flexible in their approaches to CSIs. Unlike Kingsbury who eschews UT-based procedures entirely, Chang and Péchenart introduce ten and eight UTs in their respective target texts. It is no surprise then, given Chang’s penchant for neutralizing omission, that Péchenart foreignizes CSIs the most and Kingsbury foreignizes such items the least. More precisely, the first-round results indicate Péchenart and Chang’s translations yield cultural averages of +0.57 and +0.51, while Kingsbury’s text, at +0.25, is less source- oriented. Yet, if we exclude the CSIs drawn from passages omitted in whole by Chang (i.e. OM—passage), the data reveals that the author’s “Little Finger Up,” with an average of +0.75, is more source-oriented than Péchenart’s “Attente”—with its cultural average having increased only slightly to +0.59. And these figures scarcely change in the second round, in which all CSIs are taken into consideration yet CNE and OM are both set to equal nil. In any case, no matter the mode of calculation, all averages remain within +0.25 to +0.75, thus implying a moderate source-culture orientation. As for the analysis of “Guihua,” exempting Chang’s comparatively heavy reliance on omission, the data suggests greater uniformity among translators in their approaches to CSIs. Over four-fifths of all CSI translations are categorized as SA, SS, or CNE. And this proportion increases even higher—to well over 90%—if we look only at the translations produced by Patton and Péchenart. While such figures would seem to suggest a slightly stronger source-culture orientation overall, as mentioned previously, our translators seem relatively less willing to adopt outright foreignizing procedures. In fact, Péchenart’s “Ah Hsiao” is the only translation to make a single use of UT. Furthermore, Chang has frequent recourse to the neutralizing procedure of omission, which accounts for 32 (44%) of her 72 total CSI translations. Depending on how we treat this procedure, Chang’s text either earns a notable target- oriented average of -0.25 or a modestly source-oriented +0.15 or +0.22. Regardless, whether we exclude full-passage omissions or numerically neutralize the omission procedure, Chang’s “Shame, Amah!” is the least source-oriented or foreignizing, while Patton’s “Steamed

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Osmanthus” is the most, with cultural averages of +0.39 and +0.43. Yet, it must be noted that the “Guihua” figures are much lower across the board than those for “Deng,” thus implying a less pronounced source-culture orientation. They also exhibit a wider range, extending from -0.25 to +0.43. To summarize, with respect to CSIs, Patton and Péchenart appear to follow a slightly more foreignizing approach than Kingsbury. Chang’s approach, on the other hand, is more difficult to discern because her two target texts are somewhat contradictory. “Shame, Amah!” stands as the most neutralized of all texts under analysis, but its counterpart “Little Finger Up” is arguably the most oriented to the source. Further complicating this analysis, Chang additionally transliterates non-culture- bound Chinese words and interjections in her English texts. For example, in “Shame, Amah!” Ah Nee at one point cries out in frustration “Ah ya!” (1990, p. 10). That night, when she uses English to answer Schacht’s telephone, her husband on the other end doesn’t recognize her voice. He asks, “Wei? Is Amah still there?” (p. 14). And even later, when Ah Nee returns to the neighbor’s apartment to collect her son Shin Fa, the amah asks in surprise, “Yieh? You haven’t gone home yet?” (p. 15). In the same story, Chang introduces another Chinese expression in a dialogue between Ah Nee and her employer’s mistress. The amah is trying to make excuses for Schacht, who has not returned the multiple calls of the rather clingy Miss Li: “He was up late today and had to rush out, then in the hong he was probably very busy” (p. 13). If hong constituted a CSI, it would be classed as UT + EXPLN because the editors insert the text’s only footnote to clarify the item, defining it as a “business firm” (p. 13). Yet, none of these words are culture-specific and each have ready equivalents in both English and French. For evidence, we can simply consult the translations of Patton and Péchenart.62 Similarly, “Little Finger Up” presents seven non-CS transliterations, three of which appear more than once, i.e. peng-yu [friend], tai-tai [wife; woman; Missus], and ta hsiao chieh [grown daughter]. Apart from tai-tai, all are elucidated in the first instance by Chang in-text. However, when these explanations appear sandwiched in dialogue, they may confuse and distract the target reader, whom they were ironically designed to accommodate.

62 is translated by Patton and Péchenart into “Aiya!” (2000, p. 75) and “Oh là là!” (1995, p. 134); as “Hello” (p. 86) and “Allô?” (p. 151); and as “What?” and “Comment?” Out of these six renderings, only Patton’s “Aiya!” preserves the sounds of the source-text exclamation. The others represent target-language equivalents appropriate for each situation.

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63 “Mrs. Yu, I heard that your hsien-sheng, your mister, is doing fine in the interior.” 64

65 “...But they are smart, those policemen. The pedicabs that belong to the kung kuan (big houses), they always let pass without so much as looking at them...” 66

In a multilingual milieu, while it is conceivable that a speaker may alternate between languages or translate certain items interlingually, it is far less common to see the author or translator of a text place such translations—of bits of dialogue nonetheless—behind the unfamiliar term in parentheses. In the second example, with her use of punctuation, Chang draws the reader’s attention away from the content of the conversation and instead towards her translatorial intervention, which inevitably contributes to the text’s overall foreignization. At other times, Chang’s clarifications are memorable in their power—not to illuminate—but to befuddle and implicitly foreignize:

67 “Mrs. Ho, you are a nü chang-fu, a manly woman,” complimented Mrs. Yu.68

From this translation, target readers might assume that Mrs. Yu’s comment was offered sarcastically because it is unusual for “manly woman” to be considered complimentary. Perhaps the source text was meant to expose some irony as well. But if so, Kingsbury and Péchenart both missed it, respectively translating the item in question as “a female head of household” and the tautological “une maîtresse femme” [a female mistress] (2007, p. 51; 1995, p. 164). “Little Finger Up” also preserves—and in a couple of instances adds—four recurring source-language interjections. Peng’s patient Mr. Kao at intervals yelps in pain, “Ai-yo-wa!”

63 227 64 “Little Finger Up,” p. 70 65 224 66 “Little Finger Up,” p. 67 67 232 68 “Little Finger Up,” p. 77

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(1961 , p. 65). Then, eavesdropping on their conversation from out in the waiting room, his wife Mrs. Peng sighs, “Ai, they have sharp eyes, those policemen...” (p. 67). And later on, when she is trying to get the attention of her daughter, she calls, “...Ah Mei, ah!” (p. 74). Finally, Mrs. Ho, as she grouses about getting her husband out of jail, remembers how she scolded him for his lack of gratitude: “‘Ai-ya!,’ I said, ‘so you were perfectly comfortable inside!’” (p. 74). Once again, the other translators preserve only one Chinese interjection; for the rest, they substitute English and French equivalents.69 Even though “Little Finger Up” unquestionably makes more extensive use of transliteration and preserves more source-language exclamations, “Shame, Amah!” notably preserves—and foreignizes—an additional aspect of its source text. Employed as a foreigner’s amah, the female protagonist Ah Nee has managed to learn enough English to get by, but she often speaks with irregular syntax and without regard for verbal tenses:

70 Ah Xiao could only pronounce ‘hello’ with any degree of accuracy; anything after that came out rather muddled. She had never quite grasped the difference between he and she.71

Anglophone readers who compare Chang’s English text to Patton’s may notice that the author has omitted this detail. They may also be surprised by how articulately Patton’s Ah Xiao expresses herself in the foreign language. In contrast, Chang’s Ah Nee speaks in simple, ungrammatical English, indeed rendering superfluous the above-noted depiction. Whereas Ah Xiao’s speech seems to contradict or negate this alienating portrayal, Ah Nee’s broken English separates the protagonist from target readers.

69 is rendered by Kingsbury as “Aiyo-wah!,” “Aiyo-o-WAH!,” and “Aiyo!” (p. 41); as “Oh my goodness” (p. 51); and by repeating the subject (i.e. > They’ve got sharp eyes, those cops!, p. 42). In similar fashion, the same three Chinese expressions are translated by Péchenart as “Aïe oh!” (p. 151); “Bien vrai” (p. 163); and “Oh” (i.e. Oh, ils ont l’œil vif!, p. 153). is omitted by Kingsbury, but rendered by Péchenart as “Eh” (i.e. > Eh, Afang, c’est à qui ensuite?, p. 155). As can be seen, the two translators only preserve the first itemthrough transliteration. 70 205 71 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 66

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‘Mr Garter . . . she’s gone to the office! . . .Yes, Mis-s. This is Amah speaking. . . .I’m very well, thank you, Mis-s.’...‘What time will you be sending the amah round? I’m about to go to the market and probably won’t be back until 9.30. . . . Thank you, Mis- s. . . . Don’t mention it. Goodbye, Mis-s.’72

“Mr. Schacht, she go office! Yes, Missy, I Amah . . . I very well, thank you Missy.”...“What time you send Amah? Now I go market, ha’ past nine come back maybe . . . Thank you Missy . . . Don’ mention, goodbye, Missy.”73

Curiously, Patton’s Ah Xiao seems quite proficient in navigating English inflections but gets tripped up by an elementary third-person pronoun. Taking into account the target reader’s background, he or she may not even realize that Ah Xiao communicates in standard, ‘normal’ English, but Ah Nee’s speech is sure to draw notice and accentuate her foreignness. The French text, at least in this respect, is arguably more ‘faithful’ to the source. In the original Chinese story, Chang uses Anglicized syntax, lexical borrowings (i.e. for “Miss”), and direct translations (i.e. for “sweetie”) to create a heterolingual atmosphere, and occasionally plays with these elements to expose the limited English proficiency of Ah Xiao. Yet, for better or worse, many of these markedly foreign words inevitably become unmarked in English translation. This may be why Chang decided to bring a few distinctly Chinese expressions into “Shame, Amah!” Working in a third language, Péchenart can more easily retain the hybrid, multilingual nature of the original. Similar to Chang as source-text author, she borrows certain English expressions and forms of address, such as “Hello,” “Goodbye,” “Miss,” “[Mister],” “Master,” and “Sweet,” which in this case become third- culture references. And unlike Patton, she preserves the distinctly non-standard quality of the protagonist’s (English) speech, rendering her dialogue into slightly awkward, unnatural French.

« Mr Garter elle est à son bureau !...Oui, Miss. Je suis amah...Je vais très bien, merci, Miss. »...« Quand vous envoyez amah ?...Maintenant je vais au marché, neuf heures et demie je reviens peut-être...Merci, Miss...De rien, au revoir, Miss. » 74

72 “Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” p. 67 73 “Shame, Amah!,” p. 8 74 “Ah Hsiao est triste en automne: L’étuve aux fleurs d’osmanthe,” p. 122

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[“Mr. Garter, she is at her office!...Yes, Miss. I am amah...I am doing very well, thank you, Miss.”...“When you send amah?...Now I am going to the market, half past nine I will come back maybe...Thank you, Miss...You’re welcome, goodbye, Miss.”]

In this story Péchenart may avoid transliteration, but she is evidently open to conveying this foreignizing aspect of Ah Hsiao’s character into French. Although this irregular pattern of speech accentuates the Chinese-Western socio-cultural divide—a significant theme which runs through Chang’s work—the translation problem it poses is not necessarily culture-specific. Likewise, neither is the non-culture-bound lexis borrowed from Chinese and English by Chang (and Péchenart). However, since these transliterations might be mistaken as products of certain CSI procedures, it is necessary to acknowledge their presence in target texts and to highlight the distinction between CSIs and other miscellaneous items. Now conscious of the wider applications of (un)lexicalized transliteration, we also have a clearer understanding of each translator’s approach to the given source. In general, Kingsbury’s text presents the lowest procedural variation and the clearest tendency towards neutralization. Patton, like Kingsbury, avoids UT and other extreme treatments, sticking to the middle-ground procedures. Even so, he may be somewhat more amenable to stretching the boundaries of the target language, as his text features several instances of SA, or rather lexicalized language used in semantically anomalous ways. Mimicking Chang’s heterolingualism, Péchenart borrows from English, transliterates from Chinese, and playfully bends the strict rules of French. Chang, as author-translator, takes greater liberties with her texts, frequently opting to omit details, scenes, and/or characters. As for the material which makes the editorial cut and survives in self-translation, she seems more open to experimental approaches, even relying on unlexicalized, ungrammatical, and semantically unsystematic expression.

3. Do translators handle CSIs in the same manner across texts?

At least in this study, individual translators appear to approach CSIs differently depending on the (con)text. For instance, Péchenart and Chang adopt UT-based procedures much more frequently in their translations of “Deng” than in those of “Guihua.” Whereas the two translators use such procedures to convey roughly one-tenth of the 65 “Deng” CSIs,

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within the “Guihua” corpus there is only one instance of UT, identified in Péchenart’s “Ah Hsiao.” Aside from discrepancies in transliteration, there is also a discernible disparity concerning Chang’s use of omission. In “Little Finger Up,” Chang omits 14 (22%) of the 65 “Deng” CSIs, but her target text “Shame, Amah!” omits far more, as many as 32 (44%) of the 72 belonging to “Guihua.” Reflecting these differences in CSI strategy, the averages of cultural transposition for Chang’s “Little Finger Up” suggest a somewhat stronger orientation to the source, ranging from +0.51 to +0.75, while the figures for “Shame, Amah!” indicate greater neutralization, straddling the zero-mark with a low of -0.25 and a high of +0.22. Even if the distinction between the French texts is less pronounced, Péchenart’s numbers similarly indicate a slightly more foreignizing approach in her rendition of “Deng.” To compare the two, “Attente” earns averages ranging from +0.57 to +0.65, while “Ah Hsiao” hovers between +0.28 and +0.40. Admittedly, this thesis has not set out to investigate the translation commissions or intended functions of the target texts. Yet, it is still possible in some cases to speculate as to the supratextual factors which influence translators to handle CSIs differently between texts. In particular, there seems to be a correlation between foreignizing strategies and more academic—as opposed to mainstream—publications. For example, Péchenart’s “Attente” was published in a collection entitled Shanghai 1920-1940 which comprises twelve stories from eight authors to represent this dynamic period of Chinese literary history. Targeting an intellectual, sino-curious audience, this work offers biographical notes on all authors as well as numerous footnotes, a detailed index, and a contextualizing preface to explain key facets of early 20th-century Shanghainese life. Illustrated with sketches of period architecture and longtang balconies, the collection seems geared towards an instructive purpose: to educate Francophone readers on the cultural history of China, and more specifically of its port city and business capital Shanghai. In fact, the publisher Bleu de Chine, now absorbed into the much more prominent Gallimard, was dedicated exclusively, as its name suggests, to the promotion of contemporary Chinese literature. In comparison, Éditions Zulma, the publisher of Péchenart’s less source-oriented translation “Ah Hsiao,” is not focused on one specific language, culture, or literature. The independent publishing house boasts a collection of award-winning French titles and translations from over twenty languages spoken around the world. In a 2018 interview, co- founder and managing director Laure Leroy said:

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« …un écrivain, c’est quelqu’un qui vous apporte une grande fenêtre ouverte sur le monde et sur soi-même…Je publie un roman qui se passe en Malaisie, ce n’est pas un guide touristique de la Malaisie. Mais il va nous dire des choses sur nous-mêmes, qui sont tellement proches de nous, et avec un regard un peu différent, une autre poésie, une autre manière de raconter. Mais la littérature, quand on est un vrai lecteur, on lit pour soi, on lit parce que ça nous apprend sur soi-même et sur le monde. »75 […a writer is someone who opens up a window through which you can look out at the world and at yourself...If I publish a novel set in Malaysia, that doesn’t make it a guidebook for Malaysia. Rather, it will tell us things about ourselves, things which are so close to us, yet from a slightly different point of view, and drawing on a different sort of poetry, a different way of telling the story. When you are a true reader, you read for yourself, you read for what literature can teach you about yourself and about the world.]

Translated literature, Leroy understands, has the power to open readers’ eyes and minds to diverse ideas, cultures, and ways of life. Yet, she insists that translations also encourage “true” readers to turn inwards, to reflect on their own lives, and to see their world through the eyes of others. Unlike Bleu de Chine, Zulma does not seek to educate or indoctrinate; rather, it aims to open its doors wide, absorbing and offering an eclectic collection of world literature to entertain its more mainstream audience. As evidence, Zulma’s Love in a Fallen City, with its conspicuously English title, does not offer any foreword, afterword, or explanatory footnotes. The only information provided about the author or the work itself is squeezed onto the paperback’s fashionably designed cover flaps. The distinction between the two French texts can also be seen in their cover art. Bleu de Chine’s Shanghai bears traditional Chinese calligraphy inscribed in black on a brown backdrop. Flipping the book over, the names of the authors and translators are placed prominently above the back-cover blurb penned by Alain Peyraube, a noted French sinologist. Love in a Fallen City, on the other hand, is bound with a colorful and eye-catching geometric design, free of any Chinese motif and all text except title and name of author. Though easy to overlook, this last detail reveals a subtle choice made by the publisher. Whereas Bleu de Chine prefers to use the author’s Romanized Chinese name Zhang Ailing,

75 « 7 Jours sur la Planète, » 2018

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Zulma opts to use her English name Eileen Chang, which is likely more accessible and easier to pronounce for their audience.

The peritexts of the alternate English versions seem to reveal a similar pattern. Patton’s translation, the more source-oriented or ‘conservative’ of the two, appears in Traces of Love, a commemorative anthology of Chang’s work published a few years after her death by the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Aside from “Stalemates,” which was originally written in English, and four other translated stories, this labor of love provides a look back on the iconic writer’s life, partially in her own translated words and with accompanying private photographs. In addition, the editor includes a comprehensive list of Chang’s works in Chinese and English publication, likely to spur interested readers on to further explore her literary creations. In contrast, Kingsbury’s text “In the Waiting Room”—the more neutralizing of the two alternate translations—is found in a collection published by Penguin Modern Classics, a much more popular, mainstream outlet which caters to a wider audience. The compendium takes its name from Chang’s story “Lust, Caution” but also from Ang Lee’s award-winning film of the same name and released that same year in 2007. Yet, the text appears not simply meant to complement and capitalize on the success of the film but also to educate. Otherwise, the editor would not have provided biographical sketches of the author and all six translators nor would she have written an afterword to discuss Chang’s position in the Chinese literary canon. To satisfy the curiosity of enthusiastic readers, the editor even offers a guide to Chinese pinyin pronunciation!

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Even though the texts seem to share similar objectives, with respect to cover design, their publishers clearly had different concepts in mind. Traces, the earlier publication of the two, reproduces a rather cliché poster from the 1930s depicting a flapper-esque woman gazing out coyly towards the viewer. The Shanghainese beauty is draped in a silky pink gown, perched on a ledge in a seductive pose. Framed in peach, the cover brings out the rouge of the young girl’s lips and her rosy cheeks, and conveys a soft, feminine quality and a quintessentially Chinese allure. Much more powerful in its visual appeal, the Penguin cover reprints a suspenseful still frame from Lee’s film. Dramatic lighting and intriguing angles draw the viewer’s eyes up instantly towards the lead actress, who stands askew dressed in a smart qipao. With the camera trained on her enigmatic expression, she clutches her purse as if in preparation to defend herself, eyes peering askance at her enemy who also happens to be her lover.

The back cover features a portrait of a young Chang, dressed in a satin qipao, and a blurb which sets the scene for the honey trap laid for Mr. Yi in the novella. Although there is a brief mention of the collection’s four other stories, it would be easy for bookstore browsers to miss this note, especially as the blurb is positioned between an endorsement in bold from the acclaimed director Lee and the billing block for his film at the bottom. Front and back, the graphics of this ‘modern classic’ focus attention not on Chang’s life and writing, but rather on the cinematic adaptation of “Lust, Caution.” The only pair of target texts which don’t support a correlation between a foreignizing CSI strategy and less mainstream publication are the author’s own “Little Finger Up” and

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“Shame, Amah!” This is because the two works originally appeared in collections which were both published by the Heritage Press in Taipei, Taiwan. And Lucian Wu’s 1961 New Chinese Stories seems to have the same intended aim as Nieh Hua-ling’s 1962 Eight Stories by Chinese Women, namely to compile a set of representative works from which Anglophone readers can learn about (Greater) Chinese life, history, and culture. With a somewhat instructive streak, each collection offers a brief introduction to the evolution of contemporary Chinese literature, with a spotlight of course in the Nieh text on women’s contributions. The two works also present a biographical sketch of each author. In the case of Chang, the biographical blurbs found in the Wu and Nieh texts are not just similar but nearly word-for-word matches, the only differences being that Wu preserves Chang’s name in Chinese characters and Nieh specifies the name of Chang’s American husband. To introduce “Little Finger Up,” Wu includes a full title page which is illustrated with an ink sketch of a man and woman walking arm-in-arm, backs turned to the onlooker. Unlike Nieh who does not include the source-language title of “Shame, Amah!,” Wu prints a Chinese title alongside the English headline “Little Finger Up.” Yet, as previously mentioned, it may confuse Chang’s Sinophone devotees because the title is printed as [“Fuzheng”; to raise from the status of concubine to that of wife] instead of [“Deng”; to wait, waiting]. In any case, despite the use of an alternate Chinese title, the English story without a doubt corresponds to the Chinese story of the latter designation.

While Chang’s translations demonstrate conflicting approaches to CSIs, the only significant difference between these two collections involves cover design. Wu’s New

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Chinese Stories presents a bright and colorful market scene, dotted with pedestrians, venders, laborers, and pedicabs moving through their everyday routines. In comparison, the cover of Nieh’s Eight Stories is much more subdued, portraying a young woman relaxing on a chair, her eyes cast downwards in reflection. Surprisingly, these very different pieces were painted by the same celebrated artist Shiy de Jinn; thus, contrary to appearances, maybe they aren’t so different after all.

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Chapter 7. Conclusion

Over two hundred years have passed since Schleiermacher famously spoke of the two possibilities for the “translator proper”: “Either the translator leaves the writer [emphasis added] in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader [emphasis added] in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him” (1813, p. 49). Framed in this way, there are only two options—two roads diverging in a yellow wood—either naturalize the source text or alienate the target reader. While this conception has been tinkered with and relabeled multiple times in the literature, its basic premise has lingered on in translation studies and continues to exert considerable influence. Yet, instead of providing guidance or instruction for the budding translator, this statement in a certain sense concedes preemptive defeat, because neither of these options, whether complete foreignization or whole-scale domestication, are practical or feasible. Far from the theoretical black and white, what we often find in practice and in reality is compromise. Translators do not simply stick to one path—they make pragmatic decisions to preserve and convey the alien ‘other’ in a manner that is appropriate to the given task and in a form that is familiar and acceptable to the given target audience. With respect to CSIs, this dichotomy—articulated by Aixelá in 1996 as ‘conservation’ versus ‘substitution’—has been challenged and moderated over time. As more scholars begin considering alternate continua and intermediate possibilities, the binary scale of intercultural manipulation has been gradually transformed into an unbroken spectrum of cultural fluidity. In particular, scholars point to neutralization, situated between the two extremes, as an often disregarded yet commonly adopted compromise strategy. Even though neutralizing procedures may sacrifice source-culture specificity, the translated texts they produce offer increased target-language readability. The present case study, focusing on the English and French translation of Eileen Chang’s “Deng” and “Guihua,” lends additional credence to the case for neutralization and its relevance as a translation orientation. The study findings indicate that, regardless of the translator or target language involved, CSIs tend to be neutralized and that extreme foreignizing or domesticating procedures are in most cases avoided. As a result, the target texts in general present a relatively neutral cultural identity, yet with a modest source-culture orientation. Despite this cultural congruity, there is a clear discrepancy between approaches of the four translators to cultural references. Whereas Kingsbury adopts a consistently neutralizing

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approach, Patton appears slightly more amenable to foreignization. Péchenart, on the other hand, takes cues from the Chinese source texts and plays with the conventions of her native French by borrowing English expressions and transliterating Chinese lexis. As self-translator, Chang enjoys the authorial prerogative to take greater liberties with the source texts. At times, she experiments with unlexicalized, ungrammatical expression, perhaps to replicate the heterolingualism permeating her Chinese and to compensate for numerous omissions. In conclusion, this research lends itself to multiple possible extensions of academic inquiry. With respect to the study of CSIs, it would be very interesting for other researchers to apply and adapt the proposed categorical framework to other texts and language pairs. The results of this study could, for example, be compared alongside an analysis of Chang’s highly acclaimed self-translation of“The Golden Cangue.” Another possibility would be to investigate how the CSIs analyzed in this study have been translated into other languages, especially those which represent cultures more closely related to that of Chinese. Alternatively, researchers could explore how CSIs convey Chang’s multicultural identity within her three posthumously published semi-autobiographical works, [Little Reunions], The Fall of the Pagoda, and The Book of Change. Fusing East and West, tradition and modernity, Chang represents an intriguing subject for continued cultural translation research.

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—1996

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2010

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Appendix A: “Deng” CSI Solutions by Translator and Procedure

Deng: Distribution of CSI translation procedures (A) (for a total of 65 CSIs) Chang’s Kingsbury’s Péchenart’s “Little Finger Up” “In the Waiting “Attente” Room” UT = 5 unlexicalized 1 0 0 transliteration (red) UT + EXpct = 4 unlexicalized 0 0 2 transliteration + explicitation (pink) UT + EXpln = 3 unlexicalized 9 0 6 transliteration + explanation (orange) SA = 2 semantically anomalous direct 2 1 1 translation or paraphrase (yellow) SS = 1 semantically systematic reference 13 23 18 to source culture (dark green) CNE = 0 culture-neutral 25 35 33 explanation (light green) OM = -1 omission (gray) 14 *for EC: of detail detail: 5 4 3 (light gray); of passage: 9 passage (dark gray) CA = -2 cultural analogy (light 1 1 0 blue) CS = -3 cultural substitution 0 1 2 (bright blue)

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Deng: Distribution of CSI translation procedures (B) (65 CSIs total; CNE and OM = 0)) Chang’s Kingsbury’s Péchenart’s “Little Finger Up” “In the Waiting “Attente” Room” UT = 5 1 0 0

UT + EXpct = 4 0 0 2

UT + EXpln = 3 9 0 6

SA = 2

2 1 1

SS = 1 13 23 18

CNE = 0 25 35 33

OM = 0 14 detail: 5 4 3 passage: 9

CA = -1 1 1 0

CS = -2 0 1 2

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Deng : Distribution of CSI translation procedures (C) (65 – 9 = 56 CSIs; excluding OM—passage) Chang’s Kingsbury’s Péchenart’s “Little Finger Up” “In the Waiting “Attente” Room” UT = 5 1 0 0

UT + EXpct = 4 0 0 2

UT + EXpln = 3 9 0 6 – 1 = 5

SA = 2 2 1 1

SS = 1 13 23 – 3 = 20 18 – 2 = 16

CNE = 0 25 35 – 4 = 31 33 – 5 = 28

OM = -1 14 – 9 = 5 4 – 2 = 2 3 – 1 = 2

CA = -2 1 1 0

CS = -3 0 1 2

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Appendix B: “Guihua” CSI Solutions by Translator and Procedure

Guihua: Distribution of CSI translation procedures (A) (for a total of 72 CSIs) Chang’s Patton’s Péchenart’s “Shame, Amah!” “Steamed “Ah Hsiao est triste Osmanthus Flower en automne: L’étuve Ah Xiao’s Unhappy aux fleurs Autumn” d’osmanthe” UT = 5 unlexicalized 0 0 1 transliteration (red) UT + EXpct = 4 unlexicalized 0 0 0 transliteration + explicitation (pink) UT + EXpln = 3 unlexicalized 0 0 0 transliteration + explanation (orange) SA = 2 semantically anomalous direct 5 5 4 translation or paraphrase (yellow) SS = 1 semantically systematic reference 10 23 20 to source culture (dark green) CNE = 0 culture-neutral 23 41 43 explanation (light green) OM = -1 omission (gray) 32 2 2 *for EC: of detail detail: 7 (light gray); of passage: 25 passage (dark gray) CA = -2 cultural analogy (light 0 0 0 blue) CS = -3 cultural substitution 2 1 2 (bright blue)

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Guihua : Distribution of CSI translation procedures (B) (72 CSIs total; CNE and OM = 0) Chang’s Patton’s Péchenart’s “Shame, Amah!” “Steamed “Ah Hsiao est triste Osmanthus Flower en automne: L’étuve Ah Xiao’s Unhappy aux fleurs Autumn” d’osmanthe” UT = 5 0 0 1

UT + EXpct = 4 0 0 0

UT + EXpln = 3 0 0 0

SA = 2 5 5 4

SS = 1 10 23 20

CNE = 0 23 41 43

OM = 0 32 2 2 detail: 7 passage: 25

CA = -1 0 0 0

CS = -2 2 1 2

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Guihua : Distribution of CSI translation procedures (C) (72 – 25 = 47 CSIs; excluding OM—passage) Chang’s Patton’s Péchenart’s “Shame, Amah!” “Steamed “Ah Hsiao est triste Osmanthus Flower en automne: L’étuve Ah Xiao’s Unhappy aux fleurs Autumn” d’osmanthe” UT = 5 0 0 1

UT + EXpct = 4 0 0 0

UT + EXpln = 3 0 0 0

SA = 2 5 5 – 2 = 3 4 – 2 = 2

SS = 1 10 23 – 9 = 14 20 – 9 = 11

CNE = 0 23 41 – 11 = 30 43 – 13 = 30

OM = -1 32 – 25 = 7 2 - 2 = 0 2 – 1 = 1

CA = -2 0 0 0

CS = -3 2 1 – 1 = 0 2

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Appendix C: “Deng” and “Guihua” Aggregated Data

“Deng” Chang’s Kingsbury’s Péchenart’s “Little Finger Up” “In the Waiting “Attente” Room” Score Average Score Average Score Average A (65) 33 +0.51 16 +0.25 37 +0.57 all CSIs B (65) 48 +0.74 22 +0.34 42 +0.65 CNE and OM = 0 C (56) 42 +0.75 15 +0.27 33 +0.59 excl. OM—passage

“Guihua” Chang’s Patton’s Péchenart’s “Shame, Amah!” “Steamed “Ah Hsiao est triste Osmanthus Flower en automne: L’étuve Ah Xiao’s Unhappy aux fleurs Autumn” d’osmanthe” Score Average Score Average Score Average A (72 CSIs) -18 -0.25 28 +0.39 25 +0.35 all CSIs B (72 CSIs) 16 +0.22 31 +0.43 29 +0.40 CNE and OM = O C (47 CSIs) 7 +0.15 20 +0.43 13 +0.28 excl. OM—passage

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Appendix D: “DENG” CULTURE-SPECIFIC ITEMS Added: EC SA CNE CNE Marriage “Little Finger Up” “In the waiting room” « Attente » Footnote: “Holding up the little finger is a gesture commonly understood to refer to a concubine.” Added: EC UT + EXPLN CNE SS Culture ...recited one of those jingles ...reciting his prescriptions, ...récitait une enfilade de ... 223 of his trade, with allusions the rhythmic formulae of his formules en vers*, les to mysterious gases, chi, art; his chanting made the heptamètres prenaient du and caves, hsueh, in the words dense and heavy... 41 volume dans sa bouche 151 human body. From Mr. Footnote : Il s’agit de Peng’s lips, the words gained massages de médecine weight... traditionnelle, dont la 65 pratique est régie par des préceptes versifiés. Added: EC SS CNE CNE 227 Geography “...I heard that your hsien- I’ve heard that your husband Il paraît que ces messieurs (Chongqing) sheng, your mister, is doing is doing very well up there in vivent dans l’opulence, à fine in the interior.” She the interior. 46 l’arrière ? 157 referred to Chungking as “the interior” as everybody did in Japanese-held Shanghai. 70 Added: EC SS CNE CNE 229 Geography She must have been a moon- She must have been a fortune- ...son visage rond, qui avait (Suzhou) faced Soochow beauty when favoured beauty in her youth, dû être gracieux dans sa she was young... 73 her face was so round… 48-49 jeunesse... 160 (Mrs. Ho)

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227 Added: CNE SS CNE Kingsbury ...he can’t send money here, He can’t send money back to ...on ne peut pas envoyer de Geography and here I’m so hard up. 71 Shanghai from Chongqing... l’argent de là-bas, moi ici je 227 (Chongqing) 46 suis dans la misère ! 157 ...a telegram suddenly came, telling him to go ‘inside’ at ...he got a telegram ordering ...quand...est arrivé soudain once. 71 him to Chongqing. 47 un télégramme qui l’appelait à l’intérieur 158 228 “All because they’re afraid The commanders in that the government Chongqing think the civil Tout ça parce qu’ils ont peur employees can’t concentrate servants won’t be able to que les fonctionnaires...ne on their work...” 72 focus on their work... 47 négligent leur tâche... 158 Added: CNE SS (Emilia sonchifolia) CNE Kingsbury the ruby-tipped hairpin at her jewelled hairpin, which une petite gemme rouge sur Accessories the back of the head 73 was shaped like a sprig of l’épingle à cheveux derrière (Mrs. Ho) red tassel-flower 49 sa nuque 160 (Mrs Tong) Added: CNE SS CNE 227 Kingsbury Then afterwards travelling Who’d have guessed that ...on ne pensait pas qu’il y Geography became difficult. 71 getting out of Shanghai would aurait des empêchements par (Shanghai) suddenly become next to la suite. 158 impossible? 47 Added: CNE CNE UT + EXpln -- Péchenart CKS 1 ...somebody inside there has They’re telling the men to Monsieur Jiang* a donné 227 issued an order—tells them take another! 47 des ordres, pour qu’ils to marry! Tells them to puissent convoler—on les y a marry! 71 incités ! 158 Footnote : Jiang Jieshi : Tchang Kaishek ... Added: CNE CNE UT + EXplct Péchenart CKS 2 On account of the war— Up in the interior they’ve ...à l’intérieur, à cause de la China losing too much issued a new order: since too guerre ; parce qu’il y a eu

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population in the war—Our many Chinese have died in the trop de morts dans la ... 233 government there ‘inside’ war, the men can marry again, population chinoise, has issued an order: marry a and they aren’t even called monsieur Jiang a donné des second time! 78-79 concubines—they’re second ordres, et maintenant, quand wives! 53 les hommes prennent une concubine, on ne les appelle plus ainsi, mais « seconde épouse »... 165 224 Added: CNE (altered) CNE SS Péchenart Mr. Chou was, as everybody his close relations with big ses relations d’amitié avec Government knew, an important officials 42 des mandarins 153 personage in the puppet government. It was certainly good publicity for Peng that even Chou required his services... 67 226 Appearance CNE CNE CNE (description of) her lidless eyes 69 eyes that were hooded by des yeux aux paupières lisses thick upper lids 44 155 223 Clothing OM—passage SS CNE (character omitted) split-crotch pants 41 du pantalon fendu 152 Clothing: CNE SS CS (vs. haricot) 229 accessories the two bits of green jade on her earrings, which were bits les boucles de jadéite grosses her ear-lobes of jade the size of mung comme un pois, qui lui (Mrs. Ho) beans 49 pendaient aux oreilles... 160 (Mrs Tong) Colors CNE CNE SS 236* The leaves on a tree...were as The brownish-green leaves of ...les feuilles d’automne, sur big as hands, bright a plane tree...were as big as a les platanes, grandes comme yellowish green… 83 hand, and almost transparent. la paume, d’un vert 57 diaphane de jade... 170 226 Colors CNE CNE CNE

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a soft little pink face like a Mrs Xi’s egg-shaped face had Madame Xi, un petit visage poached egg 70 a pinkish-purple tinge 45 en forme d’œuf au teint de (Mrs. Yu) pétale 156 223 Culture CNE SS CNE 223 massage bone-setting massage 41 massage 151 the office of the famous bone-setting massage clinic 41 masser 152 masseur 65 231 Culture CNE CNE CNE the children are filial 76 they remember their duty 51 les enfants respectent l’obéissance due à leurs parents 163 Culture: art UT + EXpln CNE SS 234 like a little boy in old like an old-time Chinese boy, ressemblait...aux petits Chinese paintings, any one like the ones in those garçons de la Chine of the hundred boys in the paintings on the theme ‘A ancienne, dans les images traditional pai tze tu, the Hundred Sons’. 55 « aux cent fils »*. 168 pictures of one hundred Footnote : Estampes porte- sons. 81 bonheur, offertes aux nouveaux foyers pour leur souhaiter la fécondité. 168 234 Culture: SA SA CNE entertainment Made his rounds in the he ran around to sing-song c’étaient des allées et venues singsong houses… 80 girls 54 dans les maisons closes 167

Culture: CNE SS SA —— literature The first hour he studies The first hour is for Chinese— La première, il travaille sur —— 225 Chinese—the classics, classical Chinese, Confucian notre littérature—les poetry and such. 69 texts, and so on. 44 classiques : les quatre Livres et les cinq Canons—, des textes chinois. 155

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Culture: opera UT + EXpln CNE CS 234 he was as terrified at the sight he thought I was one of the il me craignait comme la of me as if I were a Hsueh Ti emperor’s trained assassins, peste 167 Tze. 80 swooping in with magical Footnote: The Hsueh Ti Tze powers 54 were a band of trained assassins credited with superhuman powers, with whose aid the Emperor Yung Cheng had eliminated all his rivals to the throne. Mrs. Ho was familiar with their exploits as she had seen the serialized Peking opera “Hsueh Ti Tze” which had been running for years. 80 223 Food OM—passage CNE CNE 223 (character omitted) steamed crab rolls 41 des petits pains farcis au steamed rolls 42 crabe 152 les petits pains 152 224226 Food SS () SS CNE a bowl of soup dumplings 82 soup dumplings 43 tes boulettes au bouillon 154 230 Food OM—passage SS CNE (character fused with a long, winter-melon face 50 un visage ingrat en forme into Mrs. Yu) de courge 161 — Food OM—passage OM CNE — (passage omitted) ‘“There is enough to go « S’il y a du riz tout le around.”—that’s what Mr Zhu monde mange, s’il n’y en a 225 said. I raised this question pas tout le monde jeûne ». with him, and just like that he Eh oui... C’est ainsi qu’il a said: “There is enough to go réagi quand j’ai soulevé le around.”’ 43

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problème : « S’il y a du riz tout le monde mange ». 154

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228* Geography: OM—passage CNE SS alley (passage omitted) the tranquillity of little le calme d’une petite 228 alleyways, off the major maison au fond d’un streets. 48; passage 159 ; 228 that little alley 48; votre petit passage* ; 229 Mrs Wang’s alley 48; l’entrée du passage 159 ;

229 at the entrance to your alley l’entrée de votre passage ; 48; 229 Il y a bien un agent de police Haven’t you got a policeman dans votre passage ? ; to patrol your alley? 48; 229 le calme d’une petite maison that dim, dark peace of the obscure au fond d’un alleyways 48 passage 160

Index : Lilong ou longtang ou li (souvent traduit ici par « passage ») : c’est le quartier d’habitation typiquement shanghaien, qu’on trouve par séries identiques alignées en bande ; constitué d’un réseau de ruelles parallèles ou perpendiculaires où s’alignent de petits immeubles collectifs donnant sur des cours fermées, il est souvent clos de murs, avec

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un portail ou un porche de pierre massive, ou encore un bâtiment en passerelle au- dessus de l’entrée, s’ouvrant sur la rue. Il peut aussi s’agir d’un lotissement de pavillons, également réparti sur un réseau de ruelles et fermé par une grille. 176

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Geography: OM—detail OM CNE 236 alley the house opposite 83 Across the street there was a ...des vieilles maisons de row of old, red-brick houses... brique rouge, alignées sur le 57 passage de l’autre côté de la rue... 170 224 Geography: SS SS UT + EXpln occupied areas the deplorable conditions in here in occupied Shanghai 42 la situation dans les Japanese-held Shanghai 66 quartiers occupés 152

Footnote : Par l’armée japonaise (cf index)

Index : Japon : après sa victoire contre la Chine (1894), le gouvernement japonais obtint le droit d’implanter industries et commerces à Shanghai, il y eut donc des usines japonaises, et un quartier résidentiel au nord de la Suzhou, autour de Hongkou. Les Japonais représentaient la plus importante communauté étrangère à Shanghai à partir des années trente. Leur domination s’affirma (invasion de la Mandchourie en 1931), de premiers affrontements eurent lieu (bombardements des quartiers chinois de

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Zhabei en 1932) ; la guerre entre la Chine et le Japon fut déclarée en 1937, les zones sous contrôle chinois furent investies, puis l’International Settlement en 1941. La guerre s’acheva avec la défaite japonaise en 1945. 175-176 231* Geography: SS SS SS Suzhou those pebbly streets in those cobblestone streets in les rues pavées de Suzhou* Soochow 75 Suzhou 50 Footnote : Suzhou est sa ville d’origine, son langage est émaillé d’expressions dialectales 230 Government OM—passage CNE CNE (passage omitted) district headquarters 50 au palais de justice 162 Kinship CNE SS CNE “And the head of the clan ‘...I could go to the head of the Dans le clan il y a toujours 231 can’t settle things for us. He clan, but he’s from a branch un chef, même s’il est d’une hasn’t got the authority— that’s junior to ours, so génération en dessous de la belongs to a younger telling him would be too nôtre, on ne peut pas dire ce generation.” 76 embarrassing.’ 51 qu’on veut. 163 228 Kinship CNE CNE CNE parents-in-law 72 parents-in-law 47 vos beaux-parents 158 Her parents-in-law who had Those old folks, the ones Ceux qui lui avaient donné been so trying in the who’d been so hard on her, tant de fil à retordre, sur qui 232 beginning, who had caused and whom she had finally elle l’avait finalement her endless suffering but vanquished, they were now emporté, leurs aînés étaient whom she had finally won long dead... 52 aujourd’hui disparus... 164 over, were both dead now. 77

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230 Kinship CNE CNE CNE 234 a little girl in her arms 73 a little girl 49 un enfant dans les bras 160 this granddaughter 73 this granddaughter of mine 49 ma petite-fille 161 her granddaughter 74 her granddaughter 49, 53 la petite-fille 161 the little girl 74, 81 her grandchild 49 l’enfant 161 the child 81 the child 50 sa petite-fille 165 her soundly sleeping sa petite-fille endormie 167 granddaughter 55 l’enfant dans les bras 168 the child in her arms 55 228 Kinship UT + EXpln CNE CNE ‘Anyhow, at home you are “Anyway, you’ll always be ...quoi qu’il arrive dans la ta, the great one.’ 72 the first wife.” 47 famille ce sera toujours toi la première. 158 231 Kinship CNE CS CNE my adopted daughter 75 my god-daughter 50 une de mes filles adoptives my adopted daughter 76 my god-daughter 51 162 ma fille adoptive 163 ...* Marriage: SS SS SS 228 concubine And nowadays they don’t And they’re not even calling ...et on ne l’appelle plus une even say concubine—just them concubines—they’re concubine, maintenant, mais another tai-tai. 72 calling them “second wives”! une seconde épouse ! 158 47 Marriage: OM—detail SS SS —— concubine detail omitted* ...the men can marry again, ...maintenant, quand les 233 and they aren’t even called hommes prennent une concubines—they’re second concubine, on ne les appelle wives! They’re telling the men plus ainsi, mais « seconde to take another wife! 53 épouse »—on les a incités à le faire ! 165 230 Marriage: OM—passage SS SS concubine first mention: passage my old man, his concubine, ses petites jeunes femmes omitted) his sister 50 (et ses sœurs) 162

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230 Marriage: SS SS SS concubine the concubine 75 the concubine 50 une concubine 162 227 Marriage: UT + EXpln SS SS concubine taken a hsiao, a small one. 71 taken a concubine 46 avoir une concubine 157 ... Marriage: CNE CNE SS concubine On account of the war— Up in the interior they’ve ...à l’intérieur, à cause de la China losing too much issued a new order: since too guerre ; parce qu’il y a eu population in the war—Our many Chinese have died in the trop de morts dans la government there ‘inside’ has war, the men can marry population chinoise, — issued an order: marry a again, and they aren’t even monsieur Jiang a donné des 233 second time! Tells them to called concubines—they’re ordres, et maintenant, quand marry! 78-79 second wives! 53 les hommes prennent une concubine, on ne les appelle plus ainsi, mais « seconde épouse »... 165 223 Medicine CNE SS SS a framed a Chinese medical licence 41 un certificat de médecine certificate...authorizing him chinoise 151 to practise as a herb doctor 66 232 Objects CNE CNE CNE money matters 77 about money 51 toutes les questions d’argent 163 224 Objects CNE SS CNE pleasantly moon-faced 67 A concave, wok-bottom face une figure en cul de 43 marmite 153 233 People CNE CNE CNE a fortuneteller 79 a fortune-teller 53 deux diseurs de bonne aventure 165 229 People OM—passage CNE UT + EXpln (passage omitted) a policeman to patrol your un agent de police* 160 alley 48

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Index : Police : le terme employé dans les textes (xunbu) désigne la police des Concessions, composée d’agents occidentaux ou locaux. 177 234 People OM—passage OM OM (passage/character omitted) When you grow up and get Le jour où tu te marieras... married 55 167 235* People OM—detail CNE CNE ...seemed to be a young man ...avait une allure de jeune of the gentry class. 56 aristocrate... 168 234 People UT + EXpln CNE CNE “Thank you, shih-fu “Thank you, Master...” 54 « Merci Maître » 167 (teacher)...” 80 233 People (telling UT CNE UT + EXpln name) an old monk called Wu a monk called the All- le vieux moine Wuyuan Yuan 79 Around Enlightened One 53 « Perfection de l’Eveil » 166 ... 230 Religion UT + EXpln CNE CNE “...I will shang shan, go up a ...then I’m headed off to a ... je me fais nonne. 162 mountain,” she declared. By convent somewhere. 50 going up a mountain, she (Mrs Tong) meant retiring into a nunnery in some secluded spot. 74-75 (Mrs. Ho) 233* Religion SS SS SS You were enemies in your You’ve got lots of grievances Les répercussions des vies last incarnation 79 from previous lives 54 antérieures 166 233 Religion SS SS SS in your next incarnation 79

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you’ll just come back...next dans une existence future time round 54 166 233 Religion: deity UT + EXpln SS UT + EXpln (see footnote A fortuneteller told me long A fortune-teller once told me below) ago: he said I’m the that I’m the Womb of the Autrefois, deux diseurs de incarnation of Ti Tsang Earth Bodhisattva come to bonne aventure me l’avaient Wang pu-sa, the Earth life again,... 53 bien prédit, il y a longtemps God,... 79 déjà, ils disaient que j’étais la réincarnation du bodhisattva Trésor de la Terre,... 165 233 Religion: deity UT + EXpln CNE (vs. the Heavenly Dog) SS ...and my husband is the ...my husband’s the Dog et que lui était celle du incarnation of the star of Star—we’re vengeful lovers Chien Céleste*, deux Tien Kou, the Dog of locked in mortal combat... 53 ennemis mortels... 165-166 Heaven, and the two are deadly enemies. 79 Footnote : Le bodhisattva Ksitigarbha « Trésor de la Terre » est une divinité boudhiste, intercesseur compatissant auprès des âmes dans le cycle de leurs existences ; le Chien Céleste, qui incarne l’étoile du même nom, de mauvais augure, est réputé pour son caractère vindicatif. Leurs traits distinctifs, ainsi que leurs caractères « terrestre » et « céleste », en font des personnages antinomiques. 165

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233 Religion: SS SS SS incarnation 1 the incarnation of 79 ...come to life again 53 la réincarnation 165 233 Religion: SS OM—detail OM—detail incarnation 2 the incarnation of 79 detail omitted* celle du... 165 223 Religion: object CA CA CNE like the amber beads of a like amber beads on a comme les grains d’ambre Buddhist rosary 65 Buddhist rosary 41 d’un chapelet 151 233 Religion: temple CNE CNE UT + EXpln 1 the Temple of Golden Light In Suzhou, at the Golden À Suzhou...à la pagode in Soochow 79 Light Temple 53 Jinguang « Lumière d’Or » 166 233 Religion: temple OM—detail CNE UT + EXplct 2 that monk at the Golden ce moine de la pagode Light Temple 54 Jinguang 166 224* Transport CNE CNE CNE 224 the pedicabs 66 a pedicab driver 42 les triporteurs 152 224 a pedicab driver 66 a driver 42 les véhicules 152 his cab 66 a cab/his pedicab 42 leur conducteur 152 231* Transport SS CNE SS a rickshaw 75 a pedicab 50 un pousse-pousse 162 224* Unit of SS CNE CNE measurement: ten dollars 66 ten dollars 42 dix dollars 152 money Footnote: CRB$10 in spring, 1944 was roughly equal in value to US$0.80 231 Unit of OM—detail CNE CNE measurement: a lot of money 75 seven thousand dollars 50 sept mille dollars 162 234 money pay extra 81 paid an extra two hundred 55 verser deux cents dollars 167 223 Units of CNE CNE OM—detail measurement: a two-inch photo 66 a two-inch ID photo 41 une photo d’identité size

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Appendix E: “GUIHUA” CULTURE-SPECIFIC ITEMS 210 Added: EC SS CNE CNE Geography also from Soochow 10 from their home village 74 Originaire de la même (Suzhou) région 132 217 Added: Péchenart CNE CNE CS Objects the cocktail glasses 13 wineglasses 83 Les verres à apéritif 147 200 Arts: Music OM—passage CNE CNE (Content omitted) a flute melody 59 Un air de flûte 110 207 Arts: performance SS SS SS Peking opera masks 9 a Peking opera mask 69 Un masque d’opéra de Pékin 125 Arts: visual OM—detail CNE CNE Sweat pasted a wisp of A fine, short lock of hair ...une fine mèche de 200 bobbed hair on her yellow hung down alongside each cheveux mouillée lui cheek 5 of her ears. These were so retombait devant l’oreille, damp they looked like wet luisant sur son visage paint on her face. 60 comme un trait d’encre noire encore humide. 112 200 Calendar SS SS SS The Moon Festival 5 The Mid-Autumn Festival la fête de la Mi-automne 59 111 201 Calendar CNE CNE CNE the Ninth Moon 5 the ninth month 60 Au Neuvième mois 112

214 Calendar OM—passage CNE CNE (Content omitted) the tenth month 79 « ...Au dixième mois... » 214 140 (Content omitted) 14th Ninth Month 79 « ...Quatorze du Neuvième mois... » 141 212 Calendar OM—passage SA SA

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(Content omitted) a leap month 77 Mois intercalaire 137 201 Colors CNE SS CNE the big brown water jar 5 a vat like this one...soy- ce genre de cuve...brun- sauce-brown 61 jaune 113 206 Colors (jade) CNE SS SS a pale green wool jacket 8 a jade-green angora jacket Une veste en angora vert 67 jade 123 ... Colors (jade) CNE CNE CS In a flash of green There was a sudden flash ...et dans cette brutale 220 lightning a spider appeared of lightning, its bluish lumière émeraude était on the sink. 15 glare illuminating a spider apparue aussi une araignée crawling across the white qui progressait sur la enamel basin. 88 porcelaine de l’évier. 154 222 Colors (jade) OM—passage CS CNE (Content omitted) Dark, emerald-green trees Les arbres au feuillage 91 sombre 158 200 Culture OM—detail SS SS detail omitted …who had once bound Qui avait eu les pieds her feet 60 bandés Culture OM—passage CNE CNE (Content omitted) At the gaming table he ...à la table de jeu, il savait 208 always checked to see voir quand le vent tournait which way the wind was et partir avec un petit gain blowing and, if things were avant de se retrouver favourable, took advantage bredouille. 127-128 of the situation to make a bit of a profit. But he always knew when to stop. 71 Culture: CNE CNE CNE (cf. Shanghai index) 215 architecture The little room she and The room she shared with Shin Fa lived in… 12-13 Baishun… 81

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Le cagibi d’entresol où elle logeait avec Pai-shun 144 210 Culture: face OM—passage CNE CNE (Content omitted) She liked to put up a good ...elle avait sa fierté... 132 front... 74 216 Culture: face SA CNE CNE …defending her master’s …she rose to her ...elle voulut sauver la face face 13 employer’s defence… 83 pour son maître... 146 212 Culture: face SA CNE CNE “It’s a wonder you still ‘You’ve got a nerve with « Et quoi encore !...Tu es have the face to say your “Teacher this, Teacher content avec tes « Le ‘Teacher,’ ‘Teacher.’” 11 that”!’ 77 maître a dit, le maître a dit » ? » 137 214 Culture: forms of OM—passage OM—detail OM—detail address (Content omitted) ...it was addressed to ‘Miss ...elle était libellée « à Ding Ah Xiao’ 79 l’attention de Mademoiselle Ting Ah Hsiao » 140 219 Culture: humble OM—detail CNE CNE language He might slip and fall... 15 I’m afraid the child will J’ai peur qu’il glisse... 152 slip over in the wet. 86 Flag OM—detail SS SS She tilted her head and A soy-sauce bottle on the Sur le rebord de la fenêtre 202 glanced sideways at the windowsill weighed down se trouvait un petit drapeau little national flag he had a small flag he had made, a qu’il avait fabriqué, pressé made, hanging from the slender piece of bamboo sous une bouteille de sauce window sill, the flagpole of poked through the national de soja, la fine pique de split bamboo pressed under colours—blue for the sky, bambou traversait les the soy bottle. 6 white for the sun and red couleurs du drapeau, for the earth. 62 « ciel bleu, soleil blanc et

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terre entièrement rouge ». 115 200 Food CNE SS CNE rice gruel 5 congee 60 Bouillie de riz 111 snow-white mush 5 snow-white congee 60 201 Food CNE CNE CNE ... he would be especially ... he would go out of his ...il serait particulièrement difficult... 5 way to make life bumpy tatillon... 113 for her... 61 218 Food OM—passage CNE CNE (Content omitted) doughballs in soup with Une soupe de boulettes de vegetables 85 farine aux légumes 150 204 Food CNE CNE CNE (i.e. ) two pancakes 7 A couple of pancakes 65 Deux crêpes 119 213 Food CNE CNE CNE (i.e. ) a scalding pancake 11 a hot baked pancake 78 Une galette sortant du feu 139 218 Food CNE CNE CNE (i.e. ) pancakes 14 pancakes 85 Des crêpes 150 211 Food CNE + OM—partial CNE CNE stewed pork 10 dried vegetables and roast Du ragoût aux légumes meat 76 marinés 135 212 Food CS CNE CNE tea cakes 11 a snack 76 Un encas 135-136 218 Food OM—passage SS SS (Content omitted) the remains of...water D’écorces de châtaignes chestnuts 85 d’eau 149-150 200 Food OM—passage SS SS (Content omitted) ‘steamed osmanthus l’Étuve aux fleurs flower’ 59 d’osmanthe 110

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Editor’s Note: The L’« Étuve aux fleurs fragrance of the osmanthus d’osmanthe » désigne flower is synonymous with traditionnellement le début autumn. ‘Steamed’ refers de l’automne, encore both to the heat and the brûlant, quand l’osmanthe humidity of an oppressive fleurit et embaume. Indian summer. The title is also a metaphor for the heroine who is past her prime. 206 Food OM—passage CNE CNE () (Content omitted) A toffeed candy-twist 67 Du fondant de maltose 122 218 Geography OM—passage SS SS (Content omitted) a Forbidden City 85 ...une Cité interdite 149 200 * Geography CNE CNE CNE (cf. Shanghai) back alleys 5 back alleyways 59 Arrière-cours 111 214 Geography OM—passage SS SS (Content omitted) The words ‘Wu County L’enveloppe indiquait la Government’ were printed provenance, « Soochow, on the envelope… 79 chef-lieu du district de Wu » 140 214 Geography OM—passage SS SS (Content omitted) Shanghai 79 « ...Shanghai... » 140 220 Geography OM—passage SS SS (Content omitted) Yangzhou dialect 88 ...des mots en langue de Yangchow 154-155 204 * Geography SS SS SS (Suzhou) The amahs from Soochow Suzhou amahs 64 Les ménagères de Soochow 6 118 216 History: OM—passage OM CNE mythology (Content omitted) …it was dry and yellow ...frisottée et jaunie par le from over-perming… 82 fer... 145

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Idiom: beauty OM—passage SA SA (Content omitted) Her fine eyes were like two Elle offrait alors le portrait long slits, and the distant d’une souffre-douleur, ses world revealed in them was yeux gracieux et largement one of classical beauty fendus semblant s’ouvrir 204 that was capable of vers un monde lointain où ‘charming geese and de délicates beautés fishes while shaming « charment les oies et les moon and flowers’. 64-65 poissons, détrônent la lune et les fleurs ». 118 Idiom: calendar OM—detail CNE CNE “Then when can I see ‘Well, when can I see « Alors, quand pourrai-je you?” The minute he spoke you?’ At the mention of a vous voir ? » demanda-t-il. 217 of a rendezvous his voice meeting, he became very La perspective d’un rendez- hardened. He became businesslike; his tone vous galant le ramenait à sa businesslike. 14 instantly stiffening, intent façon usuelle d’aller droit on precision. 84 au but, il retrouvait aussitôt son ton ferme et son esprit d’à-propos... 148 Idiom: history OM—detail CNE CNE After she finished ironing When she had finished her Quand elle eut fini de she made pancakes with the ironing, Ah Xiao mixed up repasser, Ah Hsiao fit de la flour and sugar rationed some batter and made pâte à crêpe en puisant dans under her name and Shin pancakes, using the leurs rations de farine et de Fa’s. The man paced rationed flour and sugar sucre, à elle-même et Pai- 215 behind her, looking for which she and Baishun shun. L’homme avait un things to say. 12 were entitled to. Her man peu l’impression d’une felt as if he had been given récompense indue et il a treat he hadn’t tournait autour d’Ah Hsiao, deserved, and followed her mains derrière le dos, en around everywhere with his cherchant des paroles qui hands clasped behind his

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back trying to make ne lui venaient pas. 142- conversation. 80-81 143 Idiom: marriage OM—passage CNE CNE (Content omitted/changed) It was true he wasn’t Son homme n’assurait pas 213 supporting her, but he sa subsistance, ni plus ni probably wouldn’t have moins qu’il ne l’eût assurée been able to support her sans doute s’ils s’étaient even if they had been légitimement mariés. 140 legally married. 79 Idiom: units of OM—passage CNE CNE measurement (Content omitted) The following day, Ah Le lendemain, Ah Hsiao 222 Xiao asked the elevator- demanda au liftier pourquoi operator why the new bride la jeune mariée avait fait upstairs had made such a une scene et voulu attenter row, threatening to kill à ses jours en plein milieu herself in the middle of de la nuit. 157-158 the night. 91 209 Kinship CNE CNE CNE Ning Mei’s fiance’s family ...the family of her Ah Hsiao se souvint wanted them to get husband-to-be wanted seulement que sa belle- married... 9 them to be married 72 famille la réclamait... 129 Kinship OM—passage CNE CNE (Content omitted) By some obscure Par un obscur 220 connection she thought of rapprochement, Ah Hsiao Xiuqin and the family of songea au parquet que la her future husband who belle-famille de Hsiu-ts’in had specially put down a avait fait poser proper floor in what was to spécialement dans la be the couple’s bedroom. chambre de noces et se dit Xiuqin had no choice but to qu’elle ne pouvait pas get married. 89 refuser de se marier. 155 207 Language SA SA SS

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the glass box with the a glass case decorated with Une boîte en verre où était longevity red paper cut- a red paper-cut of the inscrit en rouge le out 8 word for “longevity” 69 caractère « longévité » 125 209 Manners CNE CNE CNE They owe me this bit of By rights that is what they De tous les devoirs à nous respect. 9 have to do. 73 rendre, celui-là ils ne devront pas l’oublier. 130 Marriage CNE CNE SA 210 ...Ah Nee, who was not She and her husband had ...Ah Hsiao, qui n’avait married to her husband. 9 not had a proper pas épousé son mari marriage ceremony. 73 « sous les chandelles ornées » des justes noces... 130 210 Marriage CNE CNE CNE the wedding chamber 10 our bedroom 73 La chambre des noces 131 the couple’s bedroom 89 211 Marriage CNE CNE CNE her dowry 10 her dowry 74 Son trousseau 133 a trousseau 75 Un trousseau 134 204 * Marriage SS SS SS a rich man’s concubine 7 the concubine of some La concubine d’un grand very rich family 65 personnage 120 214 Medicine OM—passage CNE CNE (Content omitted) Three Days Headache « ...du Remède de Trois Powder 79 Jours pour la tête... » 140 207 Objects SS SS SS Peking rugs 9 a small blue and red Un petit tapis rouge et bleu Peking rug 69 de Pékin 125 207 Objects CNE CNE CNE a waste-basket made out of a lantern 9

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a waste-paper basket in the Une corbeille à papier en shape of a palace lantern forme de lanterne de 69 palais 125 215 Objects CS CNE CNE an oven 13 a steam-cooker 81 ...un panier à étuve 144 200 People SS SS UT amah 5 amah 59 L’amah 111 204 People: amah SS SS CNE The amahs from Soochow Suzhou amahs 64 Les ménagères de 6 Soochow 118 206 Relationship CNE CNE CNE A friend of Ah Nee’s 8 A younger friend of hers Une jeune parente à elle 67 122 !200207 Relationships SA SA SA 200-201 Morning, Younger Sister Good morning, Little Bonne matinée, petite 201 Morning, Aunt! Sister! sœur Elder Sister! 5 Good morning, Auntie! Bonne matinée, ma tante ! Good morning, Big Sister! Bonjour, grande sœur ! 60 112 201 Relationships SA SA OM Aunt! Elder Brother! 5 Auntie! Big Brothers! 60 Bonjour ma tante ! 112

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200 Religion CNE CNE CNE …Heaven had turned its …the sky—now a gloomy, ...le ciel lui-même avait 219 face away, the sky blank featureless expanse—had détourné la tête 111 and sunless 5 turned its face away 59 Le ciel s’était brusquement … 206-207 Heaven suddenly turned The sky had turned around retourné et montrait sa around and showed its huge to show the world its grande face d’un noir de

black face... 15 enormous pitch-black laque... 152 face...87 207 “Our mistress is a heaven- « La patronne de chez nous made match for the master ‘My mistress and your et ton patron font vraiment here….”8 master are two of a la paire... » 124 kind….’ 68 Miss Li is really good to « ...Elle a été d’une bonté him, by heaven and earth Miss Li really cares about avec lui, un cœur and conscience. 8 him! 69 d’or !... » 124 * Religion SS SS SS 202 “I don’t know what I owed ‘I don’t know what I owed Mais quelle faute ai-je donc you in my last life.” 6 you in my last life to commise dans ma vie deserve this!’ 62 précédente ! 115 219 Religion CNE CNE CNE the world 15 the world…this mortal Ici-bas 152 sphere 87 211 Religion/death OM—passage SS SS (Content omitted) the paper dolls used in Les enfants de papier funeral services 75 mâché d’un cortège funèbre 133 Society CNE CNE CNE 215 ...the flour and sugar ...the rationed flour and ...leurs rations de farine et 218 rationed under her name sugar which she and de sucre, à elle-même et and Shin Fa’s. 12 Baishun were entitled to. Pai-shun. 142 81

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rationed flour 14 Sa ration de farine 150 rationed flour 85

218 * Society OM—passage CNE CNE (Content omitted) A young master 85 Un jeune monsieur 149 211 * Transportation OM—passage SS SS (Content omitted) a tri-shaw puller 75 Un conducteur de rickshaw 133 218 * Transportation SS SS SS A ricksha 14 rickshaws 85 Les pousse-pousse 149 204 * Units of OM—detail CNE CNE 211 measurement a big tip 7 a hundred dollars 65 Cent dollars 120 detail omitted* 3,000 dollars a month 75 Trois mille dollars 134-135 211 Units of OM—passage SS SS measurement (Content omitted) ten piculs of rice and the Dix piculs de riz et autant same amount of coal 74-75 de charbon 133

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