Homogenized literary co-translation: A Hero Born and A Bond Undone

Abstract

Although co-translation has received considerable scholarly attention recently, how co-translated texts converge and diverge stylistically, and how co-translators affect translated texts and each other remain under-researched. Based on two specialized corpora, this paper innovatively employs L2SCA and MAT to investigate the various stylistic and linguistic features of A Hero Born (translated by Anna Holmwood) and A Bond Undone (translated by Gigi Chang), English translations of the two consecutive volumes of “射雕英雄传” (shè diāo yīng xióng zhuàn), a Chinese wuxia novel by Jin Yong. It then explores the dynamics of collaboration between the two translators in translating and promoting Jin Yong's wuxia novels, based on interview records, email exchanges, and public discourses. The study reveals that the two translations are homogenized to a considerable degree and at various syntactic and lexico-grammatical levels, and that the two translators' discourses concerning Jin Yong's wuxia are also essentially identical. These similarities are attributed to several factors. In particular, Holmwood, as the principal translator and co-literary agent of the translation project, has played a dominant role and has put her “fingerprints” on Chang's translation, thus considerably smoothing out stylistic divergences of their translated texts. The two translators have deftly co-projected Jin Yong's wuxia as modern, cosmopolitan, and entertaining, thus facilitating the reception of their translations. This study sheds new light on the dynamics of collaboration between literary translators and contributes to the research methodology of translation style.

Mapping Salience and Trajectory: On How to Situate Literary Translators in Publishing Legends of the Condor Heroes With Visualization

“…Capitalizing on the previous research on Legends , we collect existing primary data from scholars such as Diao (2021, 2022a, 2022b) and Chen (2021), who organize many valuable data in person such as email exchanges and interview records with some major actors of Legends .…”

Linguistic Variations Between Translated and Non-Translated English Chairman’s Statements in Corporate Annual Reports: A Multidimensional Analysis

“…They also discovered that the linguistic features of MD&A in American firms are relatively stable and not affected by variables such as firm size or profitability, while these linguistic features do vary with firm size for Chinese companies. MDA has also been applied in translation studies in recent years, including the investigation of translated language and L2 varieties of English (Kruger & Van Rooy, 2016), translation universals in English translated texts (Hu et al, 2016), translation style (Diao, 2022) and literary translation (Chou & Liu, forthcoming; Su & Liu, 2022).…”

“…Firstly, most studies have focused on isolated language features of chairman's statements and there is a lack of comprehensive and systematic analysis of their linguistic features using language dimensions. Multidimensional analysis (MDA), as proposed by Biber (1988), which combines corpus-linguistic methods and multivariate statistical techniques to study linguistic variation, has been shown to be an effective approach for systematically studying the linguistic features of various text types (Biber, 2004;Diao, 2022;Ren & Lu, 2021;Thompson et al, 2017). However, few studies have applied MDA to the examination of chairman's statements in corporate annual reports.…”