Retranslation is a widespread practice with a long history. Works of sacred and canonical literature are frequently retranslated. The role of retranslation in reconstructing the image of a foreign text and its culture, however, remains largely underexplored. Liaozhai is a collection of Chinese short stories written by Pu Songling and completed in 1679. Since 1842 till the writing of this dissertation, at least 21 translators have translated Liaozhai into English. This dissertation undertakes a longitudinal corpus-based case study of the English retranslations of Liaozhai, addressing the following two questions: How are the retranslations shaped by the social, political and cultural relations between the source and target cultures? And how do retranslations reconstruct the image of the source text and the source culture?
The changing image of Liaozhai and of Chinese culture presented in the retranslations will be examined within the framework of three periods in Chinese history: the colonial period (1842-1917), the decolonizing period up to the end of the Mao era (1917-1978), and the “open-door” period (1978-today). The following three categories will be applied in analyzing the retranslations: the paratextual material accompanying the translations, the selection of stories for translation, and the translational approaches used. The role played by translation agents and the profile of these agents in shaping the publication, circulation, and reception of this work will also be discussed.
A parallel corpus was created to help characterize the representation of Liaozhai and of Chinese culture in the various translations and to help analyze how the representation was shaped by the social, political and cultural relations between the source and target cultures. In particular, statistical data was collected and analyzed regarding the paratexts, selection of stories for translation and translation approaches in order to document the relative popularity of certain themes in the three periods under investigation.
This dissertation finds that (1) Colonial period is characterized by contradiction; (2) In de-colonizing period, TTs reflected a new respect and appreciation for Chinese culture, and the translators of this period saw themselves as cultural mediators; (3) TTs in post-Mao period are characterized by competition between translations made by Chinese translators and those made by Western (Anglophone) translators.
This dissertation concludes that the re-translations of Liaozhai generally reflected the shifts in the relationship between China and the West. The complex re-translation history of Liaozhai problematizes the retranslation hypothesis. Due to the number of factors influencing re-translation, the history of these translations cannot be reduced to a single path of development. Unlike what Schleiermacher and Venuti argued, the binary opposition of foreignizing and domesticating translations can co-exist in the same translation.