Fashioning Sanyan Stories into contemporary written novellas —— With A Bird and Seven Lives as an example

Abstract

Evolving from bianwen and chuanqi of the Tang dynasty, Chinese vernacular stories emerged as an independent literary genre in the late Ming period, thanks to the compilation of Sanyan collections by Feng Menglong. The introduction of Sanyan stories to the English-speaking world can date back to the eighteenth century. However, these translation works have become obsolete as time has passed, and the complete translation of Sanyan at the turn of the twenty-first century is more of an academic effort than an attempt to attract a wide readership. The economic and social changes and the emergence of new technologies call for a retranslation of ancient literary classics. This paper uses A Bird and Seven Lives to illustrate how to fashion a vernacular story into a written English novella targeting the mass market. Reiss’s typology provides a framework for the text-type analysis, but it does not offer a perfect solution for the translation strategy. The Skopos theory takes translation as a purposeful action and claims that translators should take their target audience into consideration, which dictates that this paper should adopt a balanced translation strategy to attain a broad readership while retaining the Chinese cultural elements. The author believes that literary translation is also a literary creation. Some story writing guidelines and techniques have been applied during editing. With these efforts, the author hopes Sanyan stories can gain more attention from English readers and more ancient Chinese literary works can be introduced to the world.