Translating Deon Meyer's 7 Days Into Mandarin by Wei Lin 1620960 A
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Translating Deon Meyer’s 7 Days into Mandarin by Wei Lin 1620960 A RESEARCH REPORT Submitted to the Faculty of HUMANITIES, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN TRANSLATION Supervisor: Pr. Judith Inggs January 2019 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank everyone who contributed to my research project. First of all, I would like to dedicate my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Professor Judith Inggs. Thank you for being supportive throughout the whole research. In the beginning of 2018 you helped with the selection of the South African crime fiction writers, because of which the project became possible. Later in the same year you spent time to explain all the sentences and phrases that I was struggling to understand, even though I was getting on your nerves. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Ms Natasha Parkins-Maliko. Thank you for recording the names in the novel in Afrikaans for me, and thank you for explaining all the the Afrikaans and Xhosa phrases. Thirdly I would like to thank Bo Lu, my Chinese mentor, who gave me many ideas regarding how to tackle the problems I encountered in my translation. Lastly, I would like to thank Dr. Michelle Adler, the reader of my proposal. Thank you for spending time to read my proposal and coming to my seminar. I also thank you very much for the reader report and all your suggestions. ii ABSTRACT The research explores the most appropriate approach for translating crime novels such as 7 Days into Chinese. It is a twofold project: first I translated extracts from the English version of 7 Days by Deon Meyer into Chinese; then I analysed all the difficulties I encountered when translating and how I dealt with them. This is done under the framework of relevance theory and foreignization and domestication. The difficulties I discussed in the research include the translation of names, implicit information, language variety, italics, swear words, broken English, incorrect pronunciation and typos, police ranks and free translation. iii DECLARATION I declare that this dissertation is my own, unaided work. It is being submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in Translation in the University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg. It has not been submitted before for any degree or examination in any other University. _________________________________________________ (Name of Candidate) _________________ day of ________________________, 2019 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................... ii ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................. iii DECLARATION ..................................................................................................... iv Chapter 1: Introduction, Aim and Rationale ............................................................... 1 1.1 Introduction and Aim: ...................................................................................... 1 1.2 Rationale: ......................................................................................................... 3 Chapter 2: Literature Review ..................................................................................... 6 2.1 Deon Meyer and K.L. Seegers:......................................................................... 6 2.2 7 Days:............................................................................................................. 8 2.3 Crime fiction in South Africa: .......................................................................... 9 2.4 Detective fiction in China: ............................................................................. 11 2.5 Polysystem theory and translated detective novels:......................................... 14 Chapter 3: Theoretical Framework and Methodology .............................................. 18 3.1 Theoretical Framework: ................................................................................. 18 3.1.1 Foreignization and domestication ............................................................ 18 3.1.2 Relevance theory ..................................................................................... 20 3.2 Methodology: ................................................................................................. 22 3.2.1 Translation brief ...................................................................................... 22 3.2.2 Passages to be translated .......................................................................... 23 3.2.3 Categories of analysis .............................................................................. 24 Chapter 4: Translation Analysis ............................................................................... 26 4.1 Summary of the novel .................................................................................... 26 4.2 Translation of proper names ........................................................................... 27 4.2.1 Translation of names of people ................................................................ 27 4.2.2 Translation of names of places ................................................................. 36 4.2.3 Translation of other names ....................................................................... 37 4.3 Translation of implicit information ................................................................. 38 4.4 Language variety ............................................................................................ 70 4.5 Italics ............................................................................................................. 73 4.6 Swear words .................................................................................................. 78 v 4.7 Translation of broken English ........................................................................ 87 4.8 Translation of typos and incorrectly pronounced words .................................. 91 4.9 Translation of police ranks ............................................................................. 93 4.10 Free translation ............................................................................................ 94 Chapter 5: Conclusion ............................................................................................. 99 Reference list: ........................................................................................................105 Appendix A: 7 Days extracts ..................................................................................115 Appendix B: Chinese translation ............................................................................142 Glossary: ................................................................................................................163 vi Chapter 1: Introduction, Aim and Rationale 1.1 Introduction and Aim: China has a long tradition of translation. Initially, translation existed mainly because of diverse linguistic groups within China. People were dependent on translation (in the broad sense) to communicate. Documents show that as early as in the Zhou Dynasty (1046-256 B.C.), translation already existed in China (Guo 1997: 2). Translation of foreign works began relatively late and mainly focused on works from Western countries. It is not surprising, since Western countries started to interact with China from the 16th century. On the one hand, some countries started to send missionaries to China (Guo 1997: 4). The most famous missionary among them was the Italian missionary Ricci Matteo who came to China in 1583 (Guo 1997: 4). His knowledge of spoken Chinese and his good looks made it easy for him to befriend Chinese literati and officials, whom he worked with to translate books regarding natural science and astronomy into Chinese (Guo 1997: 4). On the other hand, some western countries started to invade China, such as Portugal and Holland at the beginning of the 16th century (Guo 1997: 4). Because of the the history between China and the West, and the fact that crime fiction as a genre first emerged in America (Edgar Allan Poe is often seen as the founding father of this genre), most of the translated crime stories in China are from the West. In recent years crime novels by Japanese writers have become more common in China. But crime stories from Africa and South Africa especially continue to be less known in China. Generally speaking, the Chinese knew very little about African literature at all before 1979. But this changed with the Reform and Opening Policy in 1979, and more especially in the 21st century. More and more novels were translated into Chinese, especially those written by Nobel Prize-winning writers (Qi 2015: 83). For example, many works of Wole Soyinka, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee 1 have been translated and retranslated. Despite the rise of translated African works in China, crime stories from South Africa are still under-translated. South Africa, as a post-apartheid country with its complex history and present, offers fertile ground for crime stories, for which the crime writers outside of South Africa often envy (Warnes 2012: 984). Beyond that, the fact that South Africa is a country with ―the highest murder, rape and robbery statistics in the world‖ (Fletcher 2013) also provides an abundant source of material for crime writers. For example, Roger Smith admits that ―most of my inspiration comes from the violence and corruption