On the Construction of Gender Discourse in Eileen Chang’s Translation of The Old Man and the Sea
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1605.26Keywords:
Chinese practice, feminist translation strategies, feminist translation theories, gender discourse, language manipulationAbstract
Western feminist translation theory has gained increasing attention, influenced by the “cultural turn” in translation studies and the feminist movement. However, due to differences in social, cultural and historical contexts, feminist translation strategies and practices in the West and in non-Western contexts, such as China, exhibit distinct characteristics. What requires further exploration is how these distinctions reflect the sociocultural realities of their respective contexts. This study adopts the product-oriented descriptive translation approach to examine the construction of gender discourse in Eileen Chang’s Chinese translation of The Old Man and the Sea. Using House’s (2015) translation quality assessment model, this research systematically examines, collects and analyses elements related to gender within the source text (ST) and target text (TT), focusing on their Field, Tenor and Mode. Through a comparative analysis of these linguistic dimensions, this study uncovers both the differences and similarities in the construction of gender discourse between the original work and its Chinese translation. Furthermore, by investigating these differences and similarities, the study explores the relationship between lexico-grammatical choices and the broader sociocultural context in shaping gender discourse. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how gender discourse is reconstructed in translation and how sociocultural factors influence the translator’s linguistic and discursive decisions, thereby advancing discussions of feminist translation in non-Western contexts and global translation studies.
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