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Translating Hybrid Texts in Hong Kong: a Case Study of the English Translation of Chan Koon Chung's Fiction Jindu cha canting

发布日期:2022-09-16  点击数:

讲座人:香港理工大学中文及双语学系 李德超副教授 讲座日期:9月22日
地点:雁塔校区外国语言文学研究院会议室; 腾讯会议号(877-971-933) 举办单位:外国语言文学研究院
讲座时间:14:30-16:00


内容提纲:Chan Koon Chung (1952— ) is an indigenous writer of Hong Kong. With few exceptions, his fiction draws fodder from the kaleidoscopic city life of Hong Kong and delineates the “petty” stories of all walks of people he had observed so closely since he was a boy. Written in language mixtures of Mandarin, Cantonese and English, his stories are often fusions of different cultures in Hong Kong (including the predominant British and Chinese cultures as well as some minor ones such as India, Pakistan and Nepalese cultures, etc.), for which he was dubbed “a pioneering critic for metropolitan life and culture”. His fiction, which often embody particular colonial historical and linguistic features of Hong Kong, are particularly revealing of the unique position of Hong Kong modern literature as a special “sub-system” in the polysystem of modern Chinese literature (Cf. Even-Zohar 1978). To use Samia Mehrez’s term, Chan’s stories are in fact “hybrid” or “métisses” texts due to “the culture-linguistic layering which exists within them” (1992: 121). In this paper, the English version of Chan Koon Chung’s fictionJindu cha canting (Can-do Tea Restaurant) will be studied to reveal how the hybrid features in the original work were rendered and whether the image of “colonial self” as characterized by the protagonist were duly reproduced in the translation. It is found that linguistically, Chan’s creative exploitation of language hybrid (including “language varieties, idiolects, jargon, metaphors, puns, coinage and an infinite abundance of allusions’ (Snell-Hornby 2001: 209)), which was originally meant to create a ‘new language’, was greatly downplayed in the translation. As a result, the “in-between” cultural space of the protagonist, which is typically represented by the superimposition of these hybrid linguistic features, was severely undermined. The paper concludes by arguing for the necessity of adopting a scenes-and-frames model in the translation of hybrid literature, in which a translator is encouraged to approach the text holistically and invoke all essential related knowledge to understand linguistic signs before choosing top-down overall translation strategies and making bottom-up translation solutions.

专家简介:李德超,香港理工大学中文及双语学系副教授、副系主任,香港翻译学会会刊《翻译季刊》主编。本科毕业于华南师范大学(1998),硕士毕业于中山大学(2001)、博士(2007)毕业于香港理工大学。 2008年加入香港理工大学,曾执教于广州中山大学外国语学院(2001-2002)、香港城市大学(2005-2007)。曾任香港理工大学中文及双语学系副主任、人文学院副院长。兼任广州暨南大学跨文化与翻译研究所客座研究员。曾主持英国经济与社会研究委员会与香港特区政府研资局共同资助的研究项目,研究题目为Comparable and Parallel Corpus Approaches to the Third Code: English and Chinese Perspectives。2010年荣获香港理工大学校长奖(The President’s Award)。2011年6月至8月及2012年6月获欧盟Erasmus Mundus MULTI exchange项目资助,赴英国伦敦城市大学创意写作、翻译及出版中心访学。研究领域包括翻译理论、基于语料库的翻译研究及口译实证研究。出版著作有Transculural Poetics: Chinese Literature in English Translation(Routledge, 2022, forthcoming)(与孙艺风合编),合译著作2部,包括《翻译研究:综合法》(与朱志瑜合译)和《世界历史百科全书》(与苟锡泉等合译),在国内外杂志如Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, The Translator and Interpreter Trainer, Frontiers in Psychology, Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, Interpreting, Comparative Literature Studies, Discourse and Society, PLoS ONE, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, The International Journal for Translation & Interpreting Research, Social Semiotics, Language Learning,《中国翻译》、《现代外语》、《外语教学与研究》和《外国语》发表论文多篇。