Beyond the text: a contrastive analysis of two Chinese translations of Gone with the Wind, undertaken from the perspective of Polysystem theory

Abstract

Traditional translation studies focus mainly on translated works, assessing various translations and evaluating their merits and demerits. Polysystem theory introduces a historical perspective and emphasizes the analysis of the translation process. It arguably provides a new perspective for translation studies.

This thesis is a diachronic study of Chinese translations of Margaret Mitchell’s feminist work Gone with the Wind, undertaken from the perspective of polysystem theory. In this study, I analyze the differences between translations by Fu Donghua in the 1940s and those by Dai Kan et al. in the 1990s. This research uses the case study method and the practice of contrastive analysis. Through the lens of feminism, the comparison in this study focuses on content related to female activities, female portrayal, and female behavior in the source and target texts. Based on the observations obtained from the contrastive analysis, this study concludes that the position of feminist translations in the system of translated literature influences the translation strategies undertaken by translators. Sociocultural factors pertinent or dominant in different eras can also influence translators’ translation behaviors.