Theor App Lit EN 1

Quicklink back to the overview page Overview Page of Translation Theories Applied to Literary Translations

Chapter Theor_App_Lit_EN_1

1 周巧: A Case Study on Chinese Translations of Toni Morrison’s Novel Beloved Based on Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory

摘要

长篇小说宠儿是美国当代黑人女作家托妮·莫里森独具特色的一部作品。因为这部小说的语言具有黑人英语的典型特征，且塑造的黑人形象非常丰满独特。因此本文以美国著名非裔女作家托妮的《宠儿》的汉译本为语料，从卡特福德翻译转化理论的角度分析宠儿的翻译策略和特点，从而更加了解该作品中爱与自我的主题，也更理解奴隶制下美国黑人的生活状态。

翻译转换理论是翻译学家卡特福德站在语言学的角度解释翻译过程中是从源语到目标语出现形式偏离现象的理论。根据该理论，翻译转换包括两种：一为层次转换，一为范畴转换。其中，层次转换包含两类：（1）数的转换及（2）时态和体的转换；而范畴转换则包含四大类：（1）类别转换、（2）单位转换、（3）结构转换及（4）系统内部转换。以美国非裔小说家托妮.莫里森的小说《宠儿》为例，从词汇、句法方面分析其语料特点，结合卡特福德翻译转换理论探讨在文学翻译过程中采取的转换策略与方法，并分析该理论在文学翻译中的可行性。

关键词

翻译转换理论；《宠儿》；黑人英语

Abstract

Beloved is a unique novel of Toni Morrison, who is a contemporary African American female writer. Because the language of this novel has the typical characteristics of black English, and the black characters in this novel are very rich and unique. Therefore, based on the Chinese translation of the Beloved of Toni Morrison, a famous African American female writer, this paper analyzes the translation strategies and characteristics of Beloved from the perspective of Catford's Translation Shifts Theory, so as to better understand the theme of love and self in the work and the living conditions of black Americans under slavery.

Translation Shifts Theory is a theory that translator Catford explains the phenomenon of formal deviation from the source language to the target language in the process of translation from the perspective of linguistics. According to the theory, Translation Shifts fall into two categories: Level Shifts and Category Shifts. In terms of Level Shifts, it includes the transformation of number, tense and aspect. Category Shifts cover four aspects: (1) Class Shifts, (2) Unit Shifts, (3) Structure Shifts and (4) Intra-system Shifts. Taking Beloved as an example, this paper analyzes the characteristics of its corpus from the aspects of vocabulary and syntax, and discusses the shift strategies and methods in the process of literary translation combined with Catford's Translation Shifts Theory, thus analyzing its feasibility in the literary translation.

Key words

Translation Shift Theory; Beloved; Black English

Introduction

The selected text of the translation study is a literary novel written by the African American writer Toni Morrison, which was named Beloved with the themes of love and self. It mainly talks about Seth, a female slave, who was chased on the way to escape with her daughter. Because she didn't want to see her child become a slave again, she resolutely strangled her young daughter. Eighteen years later, slavery had long been abolished, and the baby girl she killed came back to punish her mother's behavior day and night. This book is full of vivid characters, richly detailed descriptions and passionate emotions. The most important feature of the book is there is a range of slang in Afro-American English, which shows language features and reflects characters’ images.(Wang Shidong 2010:43)

In order to have a better understanding of Beloved and Translation Shifts Theory, the author study the Chinese translation of Beloved from the perspective of Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory. The appearance of Catford’s Translation Shift theory can be traced back to 1950s. Instead of talking about formal equivalence, Catford’s theory stresses meaning transmission. It is the typical reflection of the principle that form is not as important as content. The theory, devoted to two aspects, namely level shifts and category shifts, is becoming one of the most practical and influential theories in the studies about translation shifts. Correspondingly, the author writing this report will probe into the utilization of the translation shifts theory which Catford initiated, particularly, the category shifts in the studying.

The report is structured as follows: the first part is the introduction of information about the source text, the guidance theory of the translation work and the report outline, followed by the second part which focuses on the linguistic features of Beloved. As for the third part, there provides a theory introduction, namely, Catford’s Translation Shifts Theory which covers level shifts and category shifts. The fourth part is the case analysis of Beloved from the perspectives of this theory. Finally, the report ends with a conclusion, in which the whole report and several deficiencies are briefly reviewed.

Introduction to Beloved

In this part, the author will roughly introduce the main content of the novel Beloved and analyze the linguistic features of the text , laying a solid foundation for the following steps.

Main Content

Beloved tells about a black slave named Seth who fled from a Kentucky farm to a Cincinnati farmhouse alone in order to gain freedom. A month later, she was chased by slave owners. For freeing her child from the tragic fate of being a slave, she resolutely cut her throat and buried her. The child who died miserably in the hands of his own mother was named Beloved. Because she killed her children herself, the mother has been hated and rejected by the people in the community and endured the torture of conscience and great loneliness. Beloved returned to the world 18 years later. She turned into a girl, disturbed her mother, and destroyed her mother's stable and warm life.

Based on the life of a small town in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1873, the novel shows the great spiritual crisis left by slavery to American blacks through the story of a young black woman who has been reborn and a black mother who has suffered psychological suffering. It also reveals that slavery still has a strong influence on black people after the abolishment of slavery.

Linguistic Characteristics

The selected text used for this report is the literary novel Beloved and its Chinese Translation by Pan Yue and Lei Ge. This part introduces the linguistic characteristics of the source text from lexis, syntax and discourse specifically.

Language features are determined by the specific group, culture, and context. Beloved, written by an African American Writer who has a totally different writing style from normal American writers. The excerpted text has the following linguistic characteristics: In the first place, regarding lexis, many words in the novel are common, but the collocation and usage of these words are not. The words used are exaggerated and humorous, involving a large number of slang words, close to life.

Secondly, in terms of syntax, The structure is not rigorous and standard. The omission of be verbs is one of the most prominent features of black English. In addition, double negation is also a common phenomenon, which has obvious characteristics of black English sentence patterns. Finally, in terms of discourse, this book is in the form of dialogue, very colloquial and close to life, therefore the selected text is very smooth and natural. The plot of the story is complicated, twists and turns, exciting and fascinating.

More specifically, one of the most typical linguistic characteristics of this novel is black English. Black English is a kind of informal language that in novels can reveal different images and reveal the special culture of black English. Therefore, some words and phrases in this novel have their own slang meaning, making the characters rich and vivid.

Theoretical Framework

Translation theory guides translation practice as a whole or from a macro perspective. Some translation theories are directly connected with translation practice. In addition, the theory can also be used to guide the criticism and appreciation of the translation. Through the analysis and evaluation of the Chinese versions, we can explore the deep-seated reasons and promote the development of translation practice, which also reflects the promotion of translation theory to practice to some extent. In recent years, more and more scholars have tried to discuss the practical value of shift theory in English-Chinese translation and achieved some results. This paper attempts to use the Translation Shifts Theory to explore the guiding role of shift theory in English-Chinese translation practice through the analysis and study of beloved's translation strategies.

About Catford’s Shifts Theory

Since the 1950s, there has been a tendency for the integration of linguistic methods with translation in such aspects as translation analysis and translation phenomenon classification, based on which many concrete classification methods have been raised. The concept of transformation can be traced back to comparative stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation which was published in 1958 by two Canadian scholars: Jean Darbelnet and Jean Paul Vinay. According to them, among the seven translation techniques and two translation strategies, the "transposition" technique is the rudiment of translation transformation (Vinay, 1958, 46). In this regard, it is the basis for the theory of translation transformation.

J. C. Catford is a famous British translation theorist. He interprets translation from the perspective of modern linguistics and defines translation as "replacing the text material of another language with that of a different language" (Catford, 1965, 10)He regards the pursuit of equivalence as the central issue of translation research and practice, and makes a descriptive study of different language levels of translation. In A Linguistic Theory of Translation published in 1965, he defined the concept of conversion as a deviation from formal correspondence during the conversion between the source and target languages. He also said that "content is more important than form" (穆雷, 1990, 37-42). In fact, Catford borrows the concepts of category and level that were put forward by Halliday (Halliday, 2005, 33-36), then he categorized translation shift as Level Shifts and Category Shifts, offering guidance from a different viewpoint for translation to translator.

Introduction to Level Shifts

According to Catford, there are four possible levels in language: (i) grammatical level, (ii) lexical level, (iii) morphological level and (iv) phonetic level. By a shift of level, we mean that a SL item at one linguistic level has a TL translation equivalent at a different level. The level shifts are embodied in the mutual transformation of grammar and vocabulary. So it can be said that a level shift would be something that can be expressed by grammar in one language and lexis in another.

Introduction to Category Shifts

Category Shifts cover four aspects: (1) unit, (2) structure, (3) class and (4) intra-system. Category Shifts include translation without hierarchy and translation with hierarchy. Under the translation without hierarchy which is similar to free translation, there is a hierarchical relationship between the source language and the target language at any proper level. "It is meaningless to talk about category shift unless we assume some degree of formal correspondence between SL and TL"(Catford, 1965, 23). There are four kinds of hierarchical relationships:

Structural Shifts: Structural Shifts refer to the change of language structure at the level of unified grammar in translation. According to Catford, structure shift" occurs in the phonological and graphological translation as well as in total translation" (Catford, 1965, 77), such as the change of word order, which does not go beyond the grammatical level of the sentence.

Class Shifts: It occurs when “the translation equivalent of a SL item is a number of a different class from the original item” (Catford, 1965, 78). A typical example is the change of parts of speech. Therefore, the translator could translate the English words into Chinese phrases or sentences or translate the phrases into clauses.

Unit Shifts: It is also known as rank shift, which means departures from formal corresponding in which the translation equivalent of a unit at one rank in the SL is a unit at a different rank in the TL(Catford, 1965, 79). As for ranks in English, it includes word, morpheme, phrase, sentence and clause. Hence, the shifts between these linguistic units can be called Unit Shifts.

Intra-system Shifts: this kind of transformation refers to the system in which there are basic structural forms for the source and target languages, but in translation, it is necessary to choose target words not corresponding to the source words(Catford, 1965, 80). Intra-system Shifts are used for situations where the shifts occur internally (林玲，2009，74-78，82).

Feasibility

In China, the study of translation methods and strategies has been for decades, but few basic studies have been carried out from the lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels to the specific changes or transformations in the process of translation. After consulting a large number of papers on the Internet, the author finds that literary translation practice is mostly guided by Functionalist Translation Theory, Domestication and Foreignization, Communicative Translation Theory and other theories because these theories are analyzable and can be applied to various types of texts. However, Catford's Translation Shift Theory focuses on the transformation below the sentence level, without considering the translation shift of paragraphs and texts (毛菁菁，2015，145-146). However, the author chooses the works of Beloved, written by African American writers. Under the background of the melting pot of culture, African American writers are faced with the difficulties of identity authentication, and the helplessness and necessity of identity reconstruction. In order to reflect this personal emotion and retain the original text as much as possible and achieve translation equivalence between the source and target languages, there must be a shift between translation because of the dramatic differences between English and Chinese. The most systematic theory of translation shift is Catford's theory. This paper capitalizes on Catford's Translation Shift Theory to make an analysis of the English Chinese translation in the novel Beloved, to verify the effectiveness of Catford's Translation Shift Theory in guiding English Chinese translation practice, and further carry forward translation practice-related research in the future.

Catford's Translation Shift Theory is of practical value. His work is the first attempt to expound translation in a general sense. Previously, translation textbooks only touched on some empirical principles and methods. Catford describes a number of translation concepts in a systematic and detailed manner and sets objective criteria for subjective judgment of some previous concepts. Catford also illustrates why it is reasonable to realize translation transformation and equivalence, and points out that the concept of equivalence occupies a central position in translation studies. Equivalence does not mean the complete reproduction of the original language content and information, nor the blind pursuit of "formal equivalence", but "textual equivalence". His comprehensive classification of all kinds of conversions reasonably explains the actual conversions in the process of C-E and E-C translation. Therefore, Catford's Translation Shift Theory is used to analyze the grammatical, syntactic, and semantic levels in this paper.

To sum up, taking Beloved's Chinese translation as the research object, this paper analyzes the translation strategies from the perspective of level shifts and category shifts, and demonstrates the effectiveness of translation shifts theory in literary translation, so as to provide a useful reference for literary translation appreciation and practice.

References

Wang Shidong (2010). On Chinese translations of 'Beloved'. Shanghai: Commerical Press