The Translation and Reception of Mark Twain''s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Meng-qi Cai, 蔡孟琪
• Other Authors: Yi-ping Wu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/sub5m8

碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 應用英語所 === 96 === Mark Twain employed the Missouri Pike County dialect and the black dialect to represent Huck’s and Jim’s dialectal speeches in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This study investigates how the translators in Taiwan deal with dialectal features encoded in Huck’s and Jim’s dialectal speeches. The Chinese translations under investigation are produced respectively by Zhang You-song, Li Yu-han, Wen Yi-hong, Jia Wen-hao and Jia Wen-yuan, and Lin Ju-yu. A miniature questionnaire is also devised to explore the target readers’ reception of these translations. The three research questions in this research project are listed as follows: (1) How do these five translations deal with Huck’s and Jim’s dialectal speech encoded in the original? (2) Which translation is most favored by the target readers? (3) Is it necessary to represent the contrast between Huck’s and Jim’s dialectal speeches in the target text as it is in the original? The study begins by summarizing the scholarly works that concentrates on characteristics of Huck’s and Jim’s dialects. The characteristics of Huck’s and Jim’s dialects are then analyzed in lexical and syntactical ways. Mona Baker’s taxonomy of translation strategies and Eugene’s Nida’s formal/dynamic equivalence model are also employed to make a descriptive analysis of these five Chinese translations. The findings show that these five translations achieve different levels of equivalence in representing the dialectal features. Zhang’s, Li’s, Wen’s, Jia’s renderings resort to dynamic equivalence while Lin’s version intends to achieve formal equivalence. To obtain readers’ responses and expectation, this study has carried out a survey on thirty respondents: ten bilingual readers and twenty general readers. The result shows that bilingual readers prefer Jia Wen-hao and Jia Wen-yuan’s version due to its readability while the general readers prefer Wen Yi-hong’s version because her version is easy to read. While most readers think it’s necessary for translators to represent the dialectal features in the original, maximum equivalents and readability can’t be achieved at the same time. Readers’ responses might provide further insights for future attempts on retranslating dialectal novels.