Agencies in English Translations of Contemporary Chinese Women Writers: a Contextual, Paratextual and Textual Study

Agencies in English Translations of Contemporary Chinese Women Writers: A Contextual, Paratextual and Textual Study By Mengying Jiang A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Victoria University of Wellington 2020 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My PhD journey in New Zealand has shaped me personally, intellectually and socially in a way that I will value for the rest of my life. I am deeply grateful to those who have accompanied me, inspired me and supported me over the past years. I wish to thank first and foremost my supervisors Dr Marco Sonzogni, Dr Claudia Bernardi and Dr Limin Bai for their valuable comments on the drafts of my thesis. They have inspired me with good advice and encouraged me whenever I felt unsure. My gratitude also goes to Dr Frances Weightman and Nicky Harman who have provided useful information for this research. I am also thankful to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences for funding my international conference and archival research from which I have benefited considerably. Last but not least, I would like to thank my PhD fellows, especially Marta and Lita, for their enjoyable companionship, and my parents and best friend Ruoyu for their unwavering support. 2 Abstract The concept of agency has been frequently applied in translation studies (TS), especially in sociology of translation, but is still ill-defined, with no agreement on what it is precisely. This research discusses agency within a combined sociological and gendered framework, seeking to offer a systematic investigation of what agency entails in TS in order to better understand the intercultural communication of female voices from a non-hegemonic culture. In doing so, it questions a simplified understanding of agency as intermediary and argues that agency, as a theoretical tool with sociological implications, is always structural, relational and dynamic. Drawing upon ideas from Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, I first construct a field of translating contemporary Chinese women writers into English from the 1980s to the 2010s, outline the general structure that governs such translation activities and provide a diachronic analysis of how translation agents operate within different translation discourses to promote women writers. Then I refer to Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory to identify two specific agencies: 1) a feminist agency that promotes the works of Zhang Jie (1937-) in the 1980s, when there was a juxtaposition of political and feminist translation discourses; and 2) a commercial agency enacted by the male director Zhang Yimou’s film adaptation The Flowers of War (2011) operating on the translation of Yan Geling’s Thirteen Hairpins of Nanjing (Jinling shisan chai 金陵十三钗), first published in 2005. In these two case studies, I trace two translation networks and investigate how their different agencies have either strengthened or weakened the female voices inscribed in the original texts. While contextualizing how agents operate in the translation process, I examine their agency through both paratextual and textual analysis, ultimately providing what I believe is a more comprehensive understanding of agency which can enhance the analytical and explanatory power of this theoretical concept in TS. 3 The original contribution of this research to the academic discourse is three-fold. Theoretically and methodologically, it constructs an integrative framework that combines not only sociological approaches of TS, but also feminist translation studies and feminist translation criticism. Not only does it provide a field-oriented study of how women’s writing is translated and presented through different agencies, but it also uncovers strengthened feminist voices and recovers lost female voices in different translation discourses. Moreover, as a response to the ongoing intersectional and transnational turn in the study of women and translation, it goes beyond the gender- centric framework of the traditional feminist translation studies. By exploring other social and cultural specificities for Chinese women writers who enter the Anglo- American context, this research highlights the influences of political and commercial translation discourses, exposing the dilemma of translating women writers from non- hegemonic languages into English, whereby the translator or the writer either emphasizes a woman-centric perspective in the paratext or deletes references to women’s concerns in order to improve readability for a Western readership. Last but not least, this research fills a gap in existing scholarship on translating women writers into English, or what is called “the outward translation studies” currently prevalent in the Chinese academia, yielding insights into the global circulation and reception of contemporary Chinese literature. 4 Contents Abstract …….………………………………………………………………………. 3 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………….... 7 1. Defining Agency in Translation …………………….…………………………… 9 2. Feminist Translation Studies: An Overview …………………….……………... 13 3. Women and Translation: International Scholarship ………………………….… 22 4. Women and Translation: Chinese Scholarship …………………………………. 31 5. Conclusion …………………………………………………………………….... 36 Chapter One – Chinese Women’s Writing in Translation: A Field-Oriented Analysis ……………………………………………………………………………. 38 1. Constructing a Translation Field …………………………………………….…. 40 2. Contemporary Chinese Women Writers: An Overview ………………………… 48 3. Politics and Translation in the 1980s……………….…………………………… 57 4. Commercial Disinterest in Translating Women in the 1990s …….…………...… 65 5. A “Beauty Fever” in Translation in the 2000s ……………………….…………. 68 6. Multiple Agents in Translation in the 2010s….………………………….……… 70 7. Conclusion ……………………………………………….……………………... 74 Chapter Two – Translational Agencies: A Paratextual Analysis ………………. 77 1. Translation Agents in the 1980s: For Politics or Women? ….……………….…… 78 2. Dominance of Academic Translation Agency in the 1990s ……………….….…. 91 3. Commercial Agents and Translation of “Beauty Writers” in the 2000s…………. 97 4. Non-scholarly Agents and Translation of Diverse Female Voices in the 2010s.…109 5. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………… 115 5 Chapter Three – Feminist Agency in Translation: Gladys Yang and Zhang Jie …………………………………………………………………………………. 119 1. The Feminist Translation Era: A Context ……………………………………… 120 2. Gladys Yang as a Woman-Identified Translator …………………………………127 3. Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………… 155 Chapter Four - Commercial Agency in Translation: Yan Geling’s The Flowers of War ………………………………………………………………………………... 158 1. The Original Story, Film Adaptation and English Translation …………………. 161 2. Translation Process of The Flowers of War ……………………………………. 169 3. Paratextual Framing of the Translation ………………………………………… 177 4. Gynocritical Analysis of the Translation ………………………………………. 188 5. Conclusion ………………………………...…………………………………… 207 Conclusions ………………………………………………………………………. 210 Appendix 1 …………………………………………………………………………216 Appendix 2 ………………………………………………………………………... 221 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………… 232 6 Introduction My interest in studying the translation of contemporary Chinese women writers into English develops out of two specific academic focuses in translation studies: China’s “outward translation studies” (yichu/waiyi yanjiu 译出／外译研究)1 and “women and translation”. In both of these two research fields, the translation of Chinese women writers is arguably under-researched. In China’s outward translation studies, prominent attention has been given to male writers who are comparatively more prestigious both domestically and internationally. On the other hand, the research on women and translation is largely universalized under the Western feminist translation discourse, with only a small portion of studies on how women’s experiences and ideas from non- hegemonic cultures are being translated into English.2 My research takes a gender perspective towards the translation of contemporary Chinese women writers from the 1980s to the present, aiming to explore how female voices from Chinese women’s writing are disseminated through translation. As is well known to students of Chinese studies, issues of sex and gender in China were erased in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), during which time literature was dominated by a revolutionary discourse that allegedly served the interest of peasants, soldiers and workers. It was not until 1978, when the ideological and political restrictions imposed on literature were lessened, that women writers emerged as a collective identity to reclaim their gender differences. The “female voices” in my discussion have two-fold manifestations: I set out with a “distant reading” at a macro level, which provides a historical overview of what titles by women writers are selected for translation and how they are presented and marketed through paratextual elements; then I engage in a “close 1 The Chinese government’s “Chinese Culture Going Global” initiative developed in 2001 heralds a reversal in the interest of translation studies in China, with the focus shifted from inward translation to outward translation. Inward translation means translating from other languages into Chinese while outward translation refers to translating from Chinese into other languages. 2 Most of the theories and methodologies in studying “women and translation” are derived from a Western discourse. I intended to observe from a global scale how women’s writing from China and other non-hegemonic

Load more