Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
In the Creation story: the Creator created life by transforming dust into a man,and then created the woman with the man's rib. The story in the Bible shows that thefirst woman Eve was created from a rib of Adam, and woman was thus viewed as apart of man. That’s why the man proclaims, “She should be called Woman becauseshe was taken out of Man.” The great philosopher Aristotle declared that women wereborn with defect. Confucius spoke in a more harsh way, “Only villains and women arehard to get along with” (qtd. in Liu Jing 2005:3). For a long time, human history hasdeveloped according to the rule of male priority no matter in western and easterncountries. Men have always been dominant class, creative and authoritative; at thesame time women has been regarded secondary and marginal side. It is true for thetranslation, compared with the position of the source language. That’s why womenand translation are metaphorically and intimately related with each other, though theyare different in nature. In another word, because they have similar social positions,they are put together closely.We are all familiar with the conventional view in which a translation is considereda secondary work dependent on, and subservient to, the original text. The cliché, inthe context of the dictionary's omission, suggests how pervasively gendered are ourassumptions about translation (and also about translators and writers).This genderednotion becomes explicit in yet another truism, “A literal translation is plodding, like afaithful wife, and a literary translation is free, like a loose woman”. Likening atranslation to a woman, this statement assumes, first, that an original text is like a man,and second, that the relationship between a text and its translation is like a hierarchical, heterosexual relationship between a man and a woman. In this textual orsexual relationship, the original text, equated to the man, determines a tyrannicaldualism, which defines a translation (or a woman) as either literal or literary, tediousor thrilling, domestic or dangerous, too faithful or too free. As in the age-old paradoxthat binds women into the roles of virgin and whore, a translation, like a woman, cannever achieve an appropriate balance. Thus, a translation lives an imperfect femaleversion of the male original.
.....
1.2 Introduction to Translation Subjectivity
Subjectivity of the translator refers to small changes or alterations that thetranslator makes when translating text, affecting the truth value of the said documents.Although the invisibility of traditional translators plays a significant role in theprocess of translating, tradition translation theory demands that the translator mustsuppress their own thoughts and ideals when translating, as the theory believes that alltranslation is merely reproduction in another language. In doing so, the authority andoriginality of the original author is preserved.In traditional translation theory, the ideas and positions of the original authormust be kept under the highest considerations, “And this essentialist viewpoint makespeople build up the dichotomy between the original text and the translated text withgiving priority to the former one”. (Pang Yue, 2007: 33.) Translators are oftenexpected to be a sort of phantom, or an entity that cannot change the intendedmeaning of the original author.Translation theorist have mixed opinions on the matter of the subjectivity oftranslation, some believing direct reproduction being the greatest way to translate aauthors work. Qu Qiubai advocated that: “A translation should introduce the originalmeaning to the Chinese reader in a completely adequate way, and enable them to getconcepts equivalent to those the readers of Great Britain, Russian, Japan, German andFrance extract from the original”. (Sun Yingchun, 2001:296). Fu Lei's“Approximation in spirit” and Qian Zhongshu's “Transformation” are also intent onproducing a completely equivalent
