A Corpus-based Study of the Chinese Translations of African-American Vernacular English in Alice Walker''s The Color Purple

• Main Authors: Yu-ching Chang, 張妤菁
• Other Authors: Yi-ping Wu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/39909094174365140057

碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 應用英語所 === 95 === This paper aims to adopt a bilingual parallel corpus-based approach to investigate the choices made by translators on the Chinese rendering of African-American Vernacular English. In this study, the English-Chinese Parallel Corpus of African-American Vernacular English (PCAAVE) consists of Alice Walker’s use of African-American Vernacular English in The Color Purple and its three Chinese translations in Taiwan by Hui-qian Chang (張慧倩), Zu-wei Lan (藍祖蔚) and Ji-qing Shi (施寄青). WordSmith Tools version 4.0 is first employed to examine the textual length of each translation. Both Chang (52,709) and Lan’s translations (59,869) are longer than the original (52,145). Because of her omission of passages about homosexual relationship, Shi’s translation is shorter than the original. If the passages Shi has omitted are also deleted from Walker’s original, there contains more words in Shi’s translation (50,910) than in the source text (47,944). In order to examine how the three Chinese translators deal with the unique syntactic features of African-American Vernacular English, ParaConc is then utilized to investigate the renderings of seven syntactic features of African-American Vernacular English in the three Chinese translations. The result shows that the three Chinese translators tend to produce a fluent translation with Chinese idiomatical expressions or adverbial phrases, due to the syntactic disparities between African-American Vernacular English and Chinese. The three Chinese translators fail to represent Celie’s African-American Vernacular English. Lawrence Venuti indicates that the domestication strategy often results in a phenomenon that the foreignness of the source text is often minimized. This study suggests that if the characteristics of African-American Vernacular English cannot be manifested in the Chinese translation, translators should inform Chinese readers of the linguistic uniqueness of the fiction in translation preface or postscript.