A Study of Three English Translations of Shuihu Zhuan

Book excerpt: The Dent-Youngs struck a compromise between the adequacy of the source text and the acceptability of the target text. Although they made efforts to reproduce an oral narrative style as the original novel does, they frequently applied some equivalent narrative techniques from the target system while retaining part of the narrative markers from the source text. They did not stick to a fixed pattern in addressing the wide range of commentaries in Shuihu Zhuan. Sometimes strategies of divergent directions are applied to render one and the same narrative characteristic in different contexts. On the story level, while they imparted the motif of yi with rich cultural connotations both from the source pole and the target pole, they kept the literal sense of the image motif jianghu from the very beginning of the story until the end. After a detail description of the differences in narrative features, the dissertation attempts to supply viable explanations for the distinction by relating to the social context each translation happens, its translator's skopos and personal habitus. Pearl S. Buck's translation was much constrained by the norms from the literary field of the early twentieth America which decided that translation was a means to innovate literary techniques and reorient social values. Her early years'life experience in China endowed her with a fascination with Chinese classical literature and an affection for China and Chinese people. Such a life trajectory may as well have fostered her sense of loyalty to the source text of Shuihu Zhuan. Shapiro's translation activities were nearly all sponsored by the patronages of the source system. His whole translating process of Shuihu Zhuan was inevitably manipulated by the dominant ideology of the source system ranging from the selection of the source text to the goal of the translation. The ideological constraints of the source system have overridden any other factors to determine the way Shapiro made decisions through the coordinating and controlling of various agents. The Dent-Youngs' translation took place in an intermediate space between the source system and the target system. Patronage is also a decisive governing force on this translation. However, rather different from Shapiro's situation, the Dent-Youngs' patronage places more academic considerations on the agenda than anything else. Therefore, their translation strategies are more governed by operational norms such as linguistic and stylistic constraints than extra-textual forces. The Dent-Youngs'purpose of translation also affects their strategy-making. They aimed to address a new audience of general readers so that they had to "find meaningful equivalents for many local terms and proverbial expressions" while retaining "some flavor of other times and customs" (Dent-Youngs, 2010:IX). This decides that their translation does not adhere to a fixed pattern but demonstrates conflicting tendencies in dealing with certain narrative categories. Finally, the dissertation summarizes some problems implied in the current study and provides certain suggestions for further exploration. Field work like questionnaire or interviewing among the target readers about their reception and understanding of each translation is lacking in the present study. Furthermore, in the descriptive part, there are still many other aspects related to the narrative mode of Shuihu Zhuan that should have been brought under observation but go beyond what a single study can do. Future studies can cover such parameters as speech and thought presentation, direct and indirect characterization and other culture-specific motifs that are liable to causing translation difficulties.