Dialect, Voice, and Identity in Chinese Translation

Book excerpt: Dialect, Voice, and Identity in Chinese Translation is the first book-length attempt to undertake a descriptive investigation of how dialect in British and American novels and dramas is translated into Chinese. Dialect plays an essential role in creating a voice of difference for the regional, social, or ethnic Others in English fiction. Translating dialect involves not only the textual representation of a different voice with target linguistic resources but also the reconstruction of various cultural, social, and ethnic identities and relations on the target side. This book provides a descriptive study of 277 Chinese translations published from 1931 to 2020 for three fictions – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Pygmalion – with a special focus on how the Dorset dialect, African American Vernacular English, and cockney in them have been translated in the past century in China. It provides a comprehensive description of the techniques, strategies, tendencies, norms, and universals as well as diachronic changes and stylistic evolutions of the language used in dialect translation into Chinese. An interdisciplinary perspective is adopted to conduct three case studies of each fiction to explore the negotiation, reformulation, and reconstruction via dialect translation of the identities for Others and Us and their relations in the Chinese context. This book is intended to act as a useful reference for scholars, teachers, translators, and graduate students from disciplines such as translation, sociolinguistics, literary and cultural studies, and anyone who shows interest in dialect translation, the translation of American and British literature, Chinese language and literature, identity studies, and cross-cultural studies.