| Author: | Zhao, Minru |
| Title: | Translator positioning in characterisation in English translations of Luotuo Xiangzi |
| Advisors: | Li, Dechao (CBS) |
| Degree: | DALS |
| Year: | 2022 |
| Subject: | Lao, She, 1899-1966. Luo tuo Xiangzi. English Translating and interpreting Chinese language -- Translating into English Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Faculty of Humanities |
| Pages: | x, 240 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Xiangzi is a young rickshaw boy successfully created by Lao She in his famous novel Luotuo Xiangzi. The English translation of this novel was initially published in the United States after the Second World War, eliciting great sympathy among the American readers towards the character. As a best-seller, the English translation brought about multiple retranslations. Since Xiangzi became an unforgettable character in the United States through its English translations, this thesis explores how translators positioned themselves in their characterisation, how translator positioning shaped readers’ emotional responses to the character and how norms worked in the translations. It combined corpus-based and multimodal approaches to answer these questions. The analysis is shown in two sections: description and explanation. The descriptive section focuses on textual patterns of translator positioning in characterisation. It adapted a descriptive model proposed by the author (2021, pp. 5, 6) from her previously published article. This model incorporates the model of Appraisal from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and a characterisation model integrating narratological and stylistic concepts. A corpus-based study of the source text (ST) and target texts (TTs) shows that the translator’s positioning or value orientation plays a significant role in characterisation. The explanatory section links translator positioning to contextual factors, especially the translational norms in the target culture. It proposed an explanatory model, integrating a multimodality model from SFL and the concept of translational norms from Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS). It is found that despite a few inconsistencies, there is a high congruency between the translational norms actually observed by the translators and those validated by publishers and editors. This proposed model expands the toolkit of DTS for extracting translational norms from visual paratexts. This study transcends the traditional concepts and methods in DTS. Theoretically, by proposing an integrated framework, it allows a comprehensive understanding of translator positioning in characterisation. Methodologically, it adopts a corpus-based approach, which provides an effective method to uncover the textual patterns underlying the translations. Furthermore, the multimodal analysis extended the object of norm-based studies to visual paratexts. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7070.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 3.02 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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