Translation Strategies in Eileen Chang’s Self-Translation of The Golden Cangue

Abstract

As a medium, translation is an important means to promote cultural exchange between China and the West. Eileen Chang is one of few writers in the 20th century who can use both English and Chinese to write and translate literature. She’s known to have a high position in the history of modern Chinese literature. As one of her few self-translated works, The Golden Cangue provides us with a very typical research material. Comparing to the original text of The Golden Cangue with its self-translation version, this paper analyzes Eileen Chang’s self-translation strategies of the original language and cultural elements. In the process of self-translation, foreignization was mainly adopted and other translation strategies served as a supplement, which aims at paying attention to the transmission of the source language and culture.

This paper is divided into four parts. The first part briefly introduces the concept and the development of self-translation, and the difference between self-translator and translator. The second part reviews the legendary life of the writer and self-translator of Eileen Chang and briefly introduces The Golden Cangue and its English translation version. The third part analyzes the two commonly used translation strategies: foreignization and domestication. The fourth part, from the lexical aspect and syntactic aspect, explores Eileen Chang's translation strategies in the process of self-translation that she used foreignization as main method to deal with language and cultural factors. At the same time, she also adopted a domestication strategy, ambiguous translation and concrete translation or the likes.

Key words: Eileen Chang; The Golden Cangue; self-translation; translation strategies