Domesticating or foreignizing translations of titles and honorifics in hong lou meng

.. .Domesticating or Foreignizing? Translations of Titles and Honorifics in Hong Lou Meng LIU ZEQUAN (B.A (HTU); Postgraduate Dip (NTU); M.A (HUST, NUS) A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR... identifying and signposting a term of address in its context and determining its position within the system of politeness is very informative for a learner or reader 1.2.5 Hypothesis and questions of. .. usefulness of the dichotomy as a way of analyzing and explaining how translators deal with Chinese titles and honorifics concerned 1.1.2 Translation as Choices The definition of language and culture

Domesticating or Foreignizing? Translations of Titles and Honorifics in Hong Lou Meng LIU ZEQUAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2006 Domesticating or Foreignizing? Translations of Titles and Honorifics in Hong Lou Meng LIU ZEQUAN (B.A. (HTU); Postgraduate Dip. (NTU); M.A. (HUST, NUS) A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Deep in my heart, I know crystal clear that it is centuries too late to acknowledge, only at this concluding stage of my long and toiling years at the National University of Singapore (NUS), my sincere gratitude to the kind and beloved people who have encouraged and supported me through these painful but gainful years. Nevertheless, it is better later than never to express my heartfelt appreciations, especially in an era when words seem to speak louder than action. To be academically correct, the very first few people to whom I have been unpayably indebted are the faculty at NUS and they are Prof. Ho Chee Lick, Dr. Kay O’Halloran, Dr. James St André, Prof Bao Zhiming, Dr. Edward McDonald, Prof Desmond Allison, etc. Prof. Ho and Dr. O’Halloran (whom we intimately addressed as Dr. Kay) and Dr. St André were on the academic committee of my dissertation. As the head of the committee, Prof. Ho has been dutifully patient and enlightening to my research. He trained me to query into every academic issue in detail and with determination. When he kindly took me on as his supervisee due to the unexpected leave of his predecessor Dr. McDonald, I had already been one year on to the road to my doctoral research in the field of Chinese and English advertisements comparison with both systemic and corpus linguistics as tools. Seeing that my former research topic would possibly end me in no where, he considerately advised me to change either himself or myself. With reluctance and agony I turned to the present topic, and this is where I am standing now. Dr. Kay has always been a reliable teacher and friend for both encouragement and enlightenment. She led me on to the road to (Australian) functional grammar during my second Master of Arts study in English Studies in NUS, with which I completed my second MA dissertation under the supervision of Dr. McDonald. She not only iii helped in referring me to both the University of Sydney and the City University of Hong Kong, securing me admission to both institutions with Studentship/Scholarship (both of which I turned down, primarily but not exclusively because of the unique bi-lingual environment Singapore as a country offers). She also remained always ready to my help, either during my stay in or absence from Singapore. Dr. St André proved a resourceful guide, in both linguistic and academic terms. Academically, Dr. St André is favourably positioned as a lecturer of Chinese-English translation in the Department of Chinese Studies. Linguistically, Dr. St André is French by origin, American by nationality, and Chinese by speciality. He read and critiqued my dissertation, dined and discussed with me over lunch. While I mentioned Dr. McDonald in passing above, he deserves some more words. I did not choose him as both my MA and Ph.D. supervisor because he is easily associated with the American junk food brand (which was conveniently conjured up in the mind of many of my friends and colleagues). I followed the Australian because I thought he has much of what I assumed I needed for my systemic functional analysis of my bank of Singapore Chinese and English beauty advertisements, namely his functional perspective of the Chinese language as a pupil of the founder of functional grammar, M.A.K. Halliday and his better half, Prof. Hasan. As far as Profs Bao and Allison are concerned, they came to my rescue whenever the need arose. They both helped generously when I approached to them for a letter of reference to the University of Sydney and City University of Hong Kong; they listened to me with sympathy and analysed my situation in and out when I went to them with a disheartened frame of mind at the turn of my Ph.D. research. Prof. Bao, in particular, felt for me in our mother tongue, in his capacity not only as coordinator of postgraduate students in the Department of English Language and Literature, but also as a fellow country man. The second group of people who are always on my heart’s list of gratitude are my iv friends, Prof. Zhang Yenming (NTU), Prof. Goh Yeng-Seng (NTU), Dr. Zhu Shenfa, Dr. Hong Huaqing (NTU), Dr. Chen Youping (Shanghia Jiaotong), D.r Yang Ruiying (Xi’an Jiaotong), Dr. He Jisheng (NUS), Dr. Gong Wengao (NUS), etc. I would like to thank these nice guys whom I had the pleasure to know and befriend, and who gave me in an unselfish manner the feeling of being at home while at work. I am also grateful for the National University of Singapore which has so generously financed me through both my second master degree and my doctoral degree studies with a full NUS Research Scholarship, which has contributed to putting me in financial ease for full-time study in the true sense of the word. I also feel a deep sense of gratitude for the good staff in NUS’s English Department, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and Mrs. Goh Bee Hwa in the Registrar’s Office. Their consideration, efficiency, help and sense of responsibility have made a deep impression on me. Of course, I thank Singapore, a fine, friendly, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-cultural city nation which facilitated my study and stay but imposed no obligation to stay and serve. I am very grateful for my wife and my son. The chain of my gratitude would be incomplete if I should forget to thank them. For my wife, it is her quiet support and traditional contribution during my absence and studies abroad. For my son, it is his silent missing and my inaccessibility as a father. To this day, I confess that doing a Ph.D. is a sacred undertaking and this is one of the best, and the most important as well, decisions of my life. Additional energy, vitality and dedication for research were required of me. I tried to acquire the degree, gain some kind of expertise, and publish something. However, I lost quite a lot, some of which is the dearest to my life and can only be regretted for life! Anyhow, I thank you all for having shared many experiences and thoughts with me throughout the last years. To this day, I confess that a journey is easier chosen than completed, that a v journey is easier to travel when travelled together, that interdependence is certainly more valuable than independence. This thesis is the result of six years of work whereby I have been fortunately accompanied and supported by many. It is thus a pleasant aspect that I have now the opportunity to express my gratitude for all of them, albeit in whatever little way. Because you, only you, know what I have been through, and, thus, how I have endeavoured. To borrow from Hong Lou Meng, or to talk business once again: 满纸荒唐言，一把辛酸泪！ 都云作者痴，谁解其中味？ For which Hawkes’s translation can be supplied as sort of an interpretation: Pages full of idle word Penned with hot and bitter tears: All men call the author fool; None his secret message hears. Liu Zequan 6 June, 2006 vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………i Table of contents ………………………………………………...………….………..v Summary……………………………………………………………….…………….ix List of tables and figures…………………………….……………………………..xi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION…………….……………………………………...1 1.0 Overview………………………………………………………………………….1 1.1 Two Theoretical Premises……….……………..………………………………….2 1.1.1 Culture, language and translation………………………………………………2 1.1.2 Translation as choices……………………...………..………………………….7 1.2 The research……………………………………………….……………………10 1.2.1 Focus of the study…………………………………………………………….10 1.2.1.1 Social stratification……………….………………..…………………………10 1.2.1.2 Dimension of self-denigration……………………………………………….12 1.2.2 Adopting Venuti: a rationale ………………………………………………….13 1.2.3 Objectives of the study………………………………………………………...14 1.2.4 Justification of the study……………………………………………………….15 1.2.5 Hypotheses and questions of the study…..……………………………………17 1.3 Hong Lou Meng………………………………………………………………….18 1.3.1 The story…………………………………………………………………….…18 1.3.2 English translations………………………………….…………………………19 1.3.2 General introduction…………………………………………………………...19 1.3.2.2 Abridged versions………………….................................................................20 1.3.2.3 Complete translations………………………………………………………..23 1.3.2.3.1 Joly’s translation…………………………………………………………...24 1.3.2.3.2 Yangs’ translation……………………….…………………………………..25 1.3.2.3.3 Hawkes’s translation……………………………………………………….26 1.4 Implications of the study………………………………………………………...27 1.5 Structure of the paper…………………………………………………………….30 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW…………………………………………..34 2.0 Overview………………………………………………………………………...34 2.1 Translation Strategies…………………………………………………………….35 2.1.1 Linguistic dichotomies………………………………………………………...36 2.1.1.1 Literal and free translation……………………………………………………37 2.1.1.2 Formal and dynamic equivalence……………………………………………38 vii 2.1.1.3 Formal correspondence and textual equivalence…………………………….41 2.1.1.4 Semantic and communicative translation……………………………………42 2.1.2 Cultural dichotomies…………………………………………………………...43 2.1.2.1 Alienating and naturalizing………………………………………………….44 2.1.2.2 Foreignizing and domesticating……………………………………………....45 2.1.3 Translation strategies: Conclusion……………………………………………..48 2.2 Studies of English HLM………………………………………………………….50 2.2.1 Lin’s studies………………...…………………………………………………..50 2.2.2 Hong’s studies…………………………………………………………………..53 2.2.3 Liu and Gu’s study….……….………………………………………………54 2.2.4 He’s study…….……………………………………………………………….55 2.2.5 Translation studies of HLM: Conclusion………………………………………56 2.3 Politeness and Terms of Address……………………………………………….59 2.3.1 Theories of politeness………………………………………………………….60 2.3.1.1 Brown and Levinson…………………………………………………………60 2.3.1.2 Leech……………………………………………………………………...…62 2.3.1.3 Cross-cultural studies of politeness………………………………………….62 2.3.1.4 Gu’s Maxims of Chinese politeness…………………………………………64 2.3.2 Studies of address terms ………………………………………………………66 2.3.2.1 Universal perspective of address terms…………………………………….67 2.3.2.2 Cross-cultural studies of address terms………………………………………68 2.3.2.2.1 Wierzbicka’s semantics of titles……………………………………………69 2.3.2.2.2 Sun’s study of address terms in HLM….………………………………….72 2.3.2.2.3 Gu’s Maxims of Address and Self-denigration…………………………….75 2.4 Framework Construction……………………………………………………..…..79 2.4.1 Gu’s maxims………………………………………………………………..…..79 2.4.2 Sun’s principles………..…………………………………………………..…..81 2.5 Methodology…………..……………………………………………………..…..82 2.5.1 Marking systems…………………………………………………………...…..82 2.5.1.1 Marking ST titles………………………………………………………...…..82 2.5.1.2 Marking ST honorifics…………………………………………………...…..83 2.5.1.3 Marking of English renditions……………………………………….…..…..86 2.6 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….88 CHAPTER 3 TITLES (I)……………………………………….…….……………90 3.0 Overview……………………………………………………………………...…90 3.1 太太………………………...………………………………………..……………93 3.1.1 Origin and use of 太太…………………………………….……………………93 3.1.2 Renditions of 太太 …………………………………………………………….96 3.1.2.1 Hawkes’s 太太…….…………………….……………………………..…..…98 3.1.2.2 Yangs’ 太太…….……...….……………………………………………...…102 3.1.2.3 Joly’s 太太 ……………………………………………………………….....109 3.1.2.4 McHugh and Wang’s 太太….………………………………….……………111 3.1.2.5 Renditions of 太太: conclusion......………………………………………….114 viii 3.2 老太太……………………………………...…………………...…………………115 3.2.1 Origin and use ………..……………………………………………………...115 3.2.2 Renditions of 老太太………...………………...………………………………117 3.2.2.1 Hawkes’s 老太太…………...………………………………………………..117 3.2.2.2 Yangs’老太太………………………………………………………………...122 3.2.2.3 Joly’s 老太太………….…………………………………………..………….123 3.2.2.4 McHugh and Wang’s 老太太……………………………...………..………..124 3.2.2.5 Renditions of 老太太: conclusion…………………..………………….……125 3.3 奶奶 and 姑娘 …………………………………………………………………..126 3.3.1 奶奶 …………………………………………………………………………..127 3.3.1.1 Hawkes’ 奶奶 ……………………………………………………………...130 3.3.1.2 Yangs and Joly’s 奶奶……….…..………………………………………….133 3.3.1.3 McHugh and Wang’s 奶奶 ……………………………………………..…..135 3.3.1.4 Renditions of 奶奶: conclusion…….………………………………….…….136 3.3.2 姑娘…………………………………………………………………………...137 3.4 Conclusion……………………………………………………………….……141 CHAPTER 4 TITLES (II) .………………………………………….…………..146 4.0 Overview ….……………………………..……………………….…………....146 4.1 太爷 ……………………………………………………………………………148 4.1.1 Origin and use of 太爷………………………………………………………..148 4.1.2 Renditions of 太爷……………………………………………………………153 4.1.3 Renditions of 太爷: conclusion….…………………………………………….163 4.2 老爷 ………………………………………………………………………...…..163 4.2.1 Origin and use of 老爷………………………………………………………..163 4.2.2 Renditions of 老爷…………………………………………………………....166 4.2.3 Renditions of 老爷: conclusion………………….…..……………………...…172 4.3 爷 ……………………………………………………………………………....172 4.3.1 Origin and use of 爷……………………………………………………….....172 4.3.2 Renditions of 爷……………………………………………………………...174 4.3.3 Renditions of 爷: conclusion….……………………………………………...178 4.4 大爷………………………………………………………………….………….179 4.4.1 Origin and use of 大爷………………………………………………………..179 4.4.2 Renditions of 大爷…… ………………………………………………………..181 4.4.3 Renditions of 大爷: conclusion…..……………………………………………191 4.5 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...192 CHAPTER 5 HONORIFIC TERMS………...………..…………………………195 5.0 Overview……………………………………………………………………….195 5.1 Self-other Honorifics………..…….…………………………………………….197 5.1.1 兄 and 弟............................................................................................................198 5.1.1.1 Origin and use of 兄 and 弟……………………………………….………..198 5.1.1.2 Renditions of 兄 and 弟.…..………………………………………….…….200 5.1.1.2.1 Hawkes’s 兄 and 弟…………...…………………………………..………..201 ix 5.1.1.2.2 Yangs’s 兄 and 弟 ………..……..…………………………………………207 5.1.1.2.3 Joly’s 兄 and 弟……………….………....…………………………..……..209 5.1.1.2.4 McHugh and Wang’s 兄 and 弟 ………….………………………………213 5.1.1.2.5 兄 and 弟 : conclusion…………..……………………...…………...215 5.1.2 先生, 晚生 and 在下…….………………………………………………………218 5.1.2.1 Origin and use of 先生, 晚生 and 在下………………………………………..218 5.1.2.2 Renditions of 先生, 晚生 and 在下……………………………………….……220 5.1.2.2.1 Hawkes’s 先生, 晚生 and 在下…………….………………………………...222 5.1.2.2.2 Yangs’ 先生, 晚生 and 在下……...…………….…………………………....223 5.1.2.2.3 Joly’s 先生, 晚生 and 在下…………………………………………………..225 5.1.2.2.4 McHugh and Wang’s 先生, 晚生 and 在下…………………………………228 5.1.2.2.5 先生, 晚生 and 在下: conclusion…..………………………………………230 5.2 Honorifics of Self/Other Extension……..……………………………………...231 5.2.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………….231 5.2.2 Self/other’s wife………………………………….……….……………….…233 5.2.3 Self/other’s parents and relatives…………………………….………………238 5.2.3.1 Self/other’s (grand-)parents……………..………………………….………238 5.2.3.2 Siblings of self/other’s wife ………………………………………………..243 5.2.4 Things on self/other’s side…..………………………………………………..249 5.2.5 Self’s offsprings…………………………………………………………...….254 5.3 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………..….257 CHAPTER 6 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS…………..…………………….260 6.0 Overview…………………………………………………….…………………260 6.1 Findings……………………………………………………………………….264 6.1.1 Orientations of the five translations.………………………………………...265 6.1.2 Consistency of the five translations……………………………………..…..265 6.1.3 Cultural values trans-omitted………………………………………...………266 6.2 Implications of the study………………………………………………………..268 6.2.1 Theoretical implications………………………………………………………268 6.2.1.1 Venuti’s dichotomy ……………………………..……………………….….268 6.2.1.2 Cultural approach to Translation Studies……….………….………………270 6.2.1.3 Studies of Hong Lou Meng……………………………….………………..272 6.2.2 Practical implications……………………….………………………………..273 6.2.2.1 Readers’ response to English HLM………………………...………………273 6.2.2.2 The success of a translation……………………………………..…….…..276 6.2.2.3 The relationship between a translation and its strategy……………………280 6.2.2.4 Culture “trans-(re)lated”…….………….…………………………………..281 6.2.3 Venuti’s dichotomy: a final word ……..…………….……………………….284 6.3 Limitations and future research………………………………………..………..287 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….290 x Summary The primary objective of the present study is to critically evaluate Venuti’s (1995) (in)famous dichotomy of translations into domesticating and foreignizing ones, with special reference to the strategies which are used to deal with culture-specific items. To be specific, it is designed to see (1) whether Venuti’s dichotomy can be effectively employed to categorise the five English versions of the eighteenth century Chinese classic Hong Lou Meng or A Dream of The Red Chamber which have been produced over one century of time from the 1890s to the 1980s, and (2) how aspects of translation can be analysed to determine what strategy is used for its production. The study adopts as database two common types of Chinese terms of address/reference and their respective but different English renderings in the five translations: (a) eight titles which are used by social non-equals to address/refer to the Jia masters, and (b) thirty-five other-elevating and self-depreciating honorifics that are employed between social equals. Both types of data are taken from the first twelve chapters of the million-word, 120-chapter novel. The rationale behind the adoption of address terms as research foci is the integrative perspective of language and culture which views translating as translating culture and translations as choices. A review of the literature in Translation Studies reveals that since times of antiquity, translation strategies have been simplistically polarised in black-and-white characterizations, such as free-literal, communicative-semantic, naturalising- alienating, etc., so much so that there seems no middle way open for translators. Besides, previous studies of the English translations of Hong Lou Meng, though few and far between, mostly conclude by adopting these dichotomies as matter-of-fact labels. On the other hand, while the literature on Politeness Studies shows that although politeness behaviour concerns human communicative behaviour in general, it varies from culture to culture. It follows that, the use terms of address, which xi functions as the most conspicuous realizations of linguistic politeness in a culture, is governed with the social norms of address behaviour of the culture. As such, an investigation of the renditions of address terms as “cultural key words” should enable not only a glimpse of the cultural values underlying these choices, significantly, it should also provide some insight into the strategy which a translator adopts. The study adopts primarily Gu’s (1990) Address and Self-denigration Maxims of Chinese titles as frameworks. Specifically, Gu’s two maxims is used to capture the pragmatic factors, or “cultural values”, that govern the choice of a title and/or honorific in the ST and then to check the (dis)appearance of the same values in the choices which the five translators make. Based on the comparison of the values between the source text (ST) and the target text (TT) underlying the choice of an address term, the strategy which is used for the rendition is proposed. Basically, the more a rendition represents the cultural values of its ST counterpart, the more it is foreignized, and vice versa. Significantly, the study, apart from overruling most of the conclusions which previous studies of the English Hong Lou Men have drawn, disillusions the applicability of Venuti’s dualizing dichotomies – and all the other dichotomies, for that matter – to characterize translations beyond doubt. This is because, of the five English translations of Hong Lou Meng, only Hawkes’s work can be labelled as a domesticated production, and Wang’s as a foereignized one, in the true sense of the word. All the other three, however, fail to fall into either category, since their translators do not adhere to a single strategy in a systematic manner. As such, it is proposed that a continuum along the lines of domesticating-foreignizing be used to capture the extent to which a translation is oriented. The study also finds that, despite the highest degree of domesticating, Hawkes’s version is viewed by the majority internet readers as the most popular translation. And this finding undoubtedly throws a wet blanket over Venuti’s “call” for foreignizing in translation. xii LIST OF TABLES Table 1.1 Previous studies of the translations of HLM……………….…………….28 Table 2.1 Sun’s principles of address used in HLM………..…………………….…73 Table 3.1 Titles for the Jias in the corpus…………………………….………………92 Table 3.2 Renditions of minor titles for the Jias……..……………………………...93 Table 3.3 Use of 太太 in the corpus…………..………………………….…………..95 Table 3.4 Renditions of 太太 in Hawkes, Yangs and Joly...……..…………….…….101 Table 3.5 Renditions of 老太太 in Hawkes, Yangs and Joly...……..…..……….….119 Table 3.6 Use of 奶奶 in the corpus………….….………………………...………..129 Table 3.7 Renditions of 奶奶 in Hawkes, Yangs and Joly...……….…………..…….132 Table 3.8 McHugh and Wang’s renditions of 奶奶……………………………..…135 Table 3.9 Use of 姑娘 in the corpus……..….….….……..……………….………..138 Table 3.10 Renditions of 姑娘 in Hawkes, Yangs and Joly…….…………….…….140 Table 4.1 Titles for non-Jia men and their translations……….……………………147 Table 4.2 Use of 太爷 in the corpus………………………………………...……..149 Table 4.3 Renditions of 太爷 in Hawkes, Yangs and Joly………….………………152 Table 4.4 Use of 老爷 in the corpus…………………….…………………………164 Table 4.5 Renditions of 老爷 in Hawkes, Yangs and Joly…….………………..……167 Table 4.6 Use of 爷 in the corpus……………………………………………...…..173 Table 4.7 Renditions of 爷 in Hawkes, Yangs and Joly………...…………………175 Table 4.8 Use of 大爷 in the corpus………………………………………...…….180 Table 4.9 Renditions of 大爷 in Hawkes, Yangs and Joly……….………………..182 Table 5.1 Honorific terms in the corpus……………………………….……………196 Table 5.2 Self/Other honorifics in the corpus……………………………………..198 Table 5.3 Use and renditions of 兄 and 弟 and their compounds……….…………202 Table 5.4 Use and renditions of 先生, 晚生 and 在下…………...………………….221 Table 5.5 Honorifics of self/other extension in the corpus……………………….233 Table 5.6 Renditions of references to Self/Other’s wife…………………………..236 Table 5.7 Renditions of references to Self/Other’s (grand-)parents………....…….240 Table 5.8 Renditions of references to siblings of Self/Other’s wife………………...245 Table 5.9 Use and renditions of terms referring to Self/Other’s things…..……….251 Table 5.10 Use and renditions of terms for Self/Other’s siblings……….…….…..256 xiii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1 Orientation of the five English translations of HLM…….….….………..56 Figure 2.2 The Chinese address system………..…………………………………….76 Figure 2.3 Line-up of 兄 and its derivatives on the formality continuum…………...85 Figure 4.1 Relationship between chief characters in HLM………………………..151 xiv List of Symbols Chinese Pinyin Literal English translation 红楼梦 太太 老太太 奶奶 姑娘 爷 太爷 老爷 大爷 兄 尊兄 老兄 弟 小弟 先生 老先生 晚生 在下 贵省 贵东家 令亲大人 令尊 尊翁 尊名 尊夫人 尊府 家父 家祖母 家父母 家岳母 贱荆 贱内 内人 儿妇 hong lou meng tai tai lao tai tai nai nai gu niang ye tai ye lao ye da ye xiong zun xiong lao xiong di xiao di xian sheng lao xian sheng wan sheng zai xia gui sheng gui dong jia lingqin da ren ling zun zun weng zun ming zun fu ren zun fu jia fu jia zu fu jia fu mu jia yue mu jian jing jian nei nei ren er fu Red Chamber Dream Mrs.; madame old lady; Venerable Madam young mistress of the house Miss Master Venerable Master Mr. young master elder brother respectable elder brother old elder brother younger brother little younger brother Mr. old Mr. late born your subordinate your honourable province your honourable host your refined great relative your refined respectable (father) your respectable (old man) your respectable name your respectable wife your honourable mansion my home father my home grandfather my home parent my home mother-in-law my humble wife my humble interior my interior woman my son’s woman xv 内兄 舍亲 小女 小婿 敝友 敝斋 小斋 nei xiong she qin xiao nu xiao xu bi you bi zhai xiao zhai my interior elder brother my hut’s relative my little girl my little son-in-law my lowly friend my lowly study my little study xvi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.0 OVERVIEW The present study undertakes to make a product-oriented, descriptive comparison of the first 12 chapters of five English versions of the eighteenth century Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng 1 ( 《红楼梦》 or Red Chamber Dream 2 ) (to be abbreviated as HLM hereinafter) with reference to their renditions of eight titles and thirty-five honorific expressions that appear in these chapters. While both titles and honorifics pertain to the general category of Terms of address or TA for short, TA is here taken as an umbrella term which includes titles, kinship terms and honorifics (both self-deprecatory and otherelevating ones) which are used both to address and refer to people. This generalization can find justification in Chao (1956:217) where both vocatives (i.e., terms of direct address to call persons by) and designatives (i.e., mentioning terms, which one uses as part of connected discourse in speaking of persons) are grouped under the general heading. This categorization reflects the true picture of the use of Chinese terms of address in HLM. According to Wierzbicka (1991:333), 1 As will be mentioned later in this chapter, different English titles are used for its various translations. To do fair to all translators, and to avoid confusion, pinyin, the Chinese spelling system, is adopted throughout this thesis to refer to the Chinese original. 2 For purpose of reference and comparison, Chinese terms, such as names of persons, places, buildings, notions, etc., are all shown in accordance with their Chinese (pinyin) spelling, with their characters and/or literal meaning supplied in brackets. 1 Every language has its own key words, which reflect the core values of the culture. Consequently, cultures can be revealingly studied, compared, and explained to outsiders through their key words. Starting from this perspective, we take terms of address occurring in HLM as “cultural key words” (CKW) of the Chinese language of the time, and look at them as a culturespecific locus which could possibly require a translator of special attention because of the way they are used and the cultural meaning values with which they are loaded. Based on Venuti’s (1995) general premises about foreignizing and domesticating translation strategies, this study primarily intends to contribute to Venuti’s postcolonial translation theory by determining how aspects of translated texts can be practically analysed as actualizations of the two strategies he advocates. This chapter commences with an argumentation for the underlying theses on which this study is established: (i) translating means translating culture, (ii) translating constitutes a process of choice. This is followed by a presentation of the objectives, focus, questions as well as hypotheses of the present study. After this presentation comes a brief introduction of the Chinese novel HLM and its five English versions in our scrutiny. Following a discussion of the implications of the study, this chapter concludes with an introduction of the structure of the dissertation. 1.1 TWO THEORETICAL PREMISSES 1.1.1 Culture, Language and Translation The pre-requisite for both the assumption of terms of address as cultural key words and their use as a focus for translation studies here lies in the Sapir-Whorf and 2 Lotman chorus that no language can exist unless it is steeped in the context of culture; and no culture can exist which does not have at its centre the structure of natural language (Lotman, 1978:211-32). This integrative view of language and culture entails that the meaning of any linguistic item, address terms included, be properly understood only with reference to the cultural context enveloping it. Since meaning is of particular importance in translation, it follows that translation cannot be fully understood outside a cultural frame of reference. It thus seems that a brief account of the basic conceptualization of culture, language, and translation, and their relationships with one another should be in place prior to the unfolding of the research analysis. The concept of culture constitutes the concern of many different disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology, literature and cultural studies, and the definitions offered in these fields vary in accordance with the particular frame of reference involved. Of these definitions, the humanistic and anthropological concepts of culture stand out as most relevant to translation studies (House, 2002:93). The former concerns itself with the “cultural heritage” as a model of refinement, an exclusive aggregation of a society’s artifacts, i.e., masterpieces in fine arts, literature, music etc. The latter sees culture as encompassing “the overall way of life of a community, i.e., all those traditional, explicit and implicit designs for living which act as potential guides for the behaviour of members of the culture” (ibid). Culture in this perspective refers not only to the “conventional ideal of individual refinement, built upon a certain modicum of assimilated knowledge and experience” (Sapir, 1964:81). More importantly, it “embraces…those general attitudes, views of life, and specific manifestations of civilization that give a particular people its 3 distinctive place in the world” (ibid:83). In what follows, the broad anthropological sense of culture will be pursued. With regard to the levels at which culture can be analysed, House (2002) summarised four levels with which culture is characterised or differentiated: human, societal/national, demographical and personal. The first level is the general human level “along which human beings differ from animals” in that human beings are capable of reflection, and able to shape and change their environment (ibid:93). The other general ability which prevails universally across all cultures is the politeness phenomenon, which will be reviewed in Section 2.3 below. The second level is the societal, national level, where culture functions as “the unifying, binding force which enables human beings to position themselves vis-à-vis systems of government, dominant activities, religious beliefs and values” (ibid). The third level of culture, for House (ibid), “corresponds to the second level but captures various societal and national subgroups” depending on geographical region, social class, age, sex, professional activity and topic. Note that although House does not apply the jargon “demographical” to define this level, these features of characterization necessitate the abstraction. The fourth level is the personal, the individual one pertaining to the individual’s guidelines of thinking and acting. According to House (ibid), this level constitutes cultural consciousness “which enables a human being to be aware of what characterises his or her own culture and makes it distinct from others.” 4 The integration of human, social and individual views of culture thus likens culture to “the collective programming of the human mind” (Hofstede, 1991:5), a view which gets elaborate formulation in Goodenough’s (1964:36) concept of culture as: whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its [i.e., a society’s] members, and do so in any role that they accept for any one of themselves…Culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behaviour, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the forms of things that people have in mind, their model of perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them. The anthropological view of culture emphasises both the cognitive and social aspects of culture: the former guides and monitors humans actions while the latter stresses the traditional features shared by members of a society. The guiding and sharing of a culture primarily take the form of values, norms, traditions, etc., which, in the long run, result in both public and mental/private presentations among the members of the culture who are being constantly influenced by it. From the viewpoint of the Prague School of Linguistics or British Contextualism, “schools which conceive of language as primarily a social phenomenon, which is naturally and inextricably intertwined with culture” (House, 2002:92), the influence of culture on the members of the society in which it is embedded is “exerted most prominently” through language used by the members in their interactions with members of both the same and different socio-cultural groups (ibid:93). This overriding position of language presiding any culture, depends not merely on its takenfor-granted role as the most important means of communicating, of transmitting information, and supplying human bonding. It is also established on its use by the members of a culture as the prime means to acquire knowledge of the world, to transmit or visualize their respective mental presentations. In addition, language also functions as a means to categorise cultural experience, thought and behaviour. In a nutshell, language 5 becomes the prime instrument of a “collective knowledge reservoir” (ibid) to be passed on from one generation to another. It follows that language and culture are naturally and obviously interrelated, in the most intimate manner, on the levels of semantics where the vocabulary of a language reflects the culture shared by its speakers. And this thus naturally brings us back to our preluding assumption of terms of address as cultural key terms. As will be reviewed in Section 2.3 below, the use of terms of address to designate people constitutes a universal politeness phenomenon, which falls on the first, i.e., the human, level of our anthropological characterisation of culture. However, when, how and what address terms to use to realize politeness with reference to address behaviour depends on the social norms of a culture. And this constitutes the cultural specificity of the universal politeness phenomenon where addressing and/or referring to people is concerned, an identification which corresponds to the second and third levels of the anthropological differentiation of culture, that is the social/national and demographical levels of culture. Recognition of language as falling within the broader context of culture whereby meaning is seen as contextually determined and constructed thus entails a cultural implication for translation, a variability factor the translator has to take into account. As Nida (1964:130) incisively puts it, “differences between cultures may cause more severe complications for the translator than do differences in language structure.” This is especially true of situations where CKW are involved. In Aixelá’s (1996:57) words, There is a common tendency to identify [CKW] with those items especially linked to the arbitrary area of each linguistic system – its local institutions, streets, historical figures, 6 place names, personal names, periodicals, works of art, etc. – which will normally present a translation problem in other languages. Apparently, terms of address pertain to this category of lexical items and will undoubtedly posit a problem in translation. To solve this problem, two diametrically opposing approaches emerge as the usual practices, as succinctly depicted by Aixelá (1996:54, original emphasis): Thus, faced with the difference implied by the other, with a whole series of cultural signs capable of denying and/or questioning our own way of life, translation provides the receiving society with a wide range of strategies, ranging from conservation (acceptance of the difference by means of the reproduction of the cultural signs in the source text), to naturalization (transformation of the other into a cultural replica). Admittedly, however, both Aixelá’s identification and conceptualisation of the two strategies come as nothing new. As will be reviewed in 2.1 below, various terms have been conceived to capture the strategical dichotomy of translations, from the timehonoured free-literal, to the contemporary foreignizing-domesticating. By adopting Venuti’s dichotomy as a cover term, this study wishes to explore, more specifically, the usefulness of the dichotomy as a way of analyzing and explaining how translators deal with Chinese titles and honorifics concerned. 1.1.2 Translation as Choices The definition of language and culture serves as a vantage point for a cultural approach to translation as taking place in concrete, definable situations that involve members of different cultures (Chesterman, 1993:2; Nord, 1997:23). Since translating means comparing cultures (Nord, 1997:34), the translating process entails, first of all, a process of comparing, and, then, one of motivated choices. This observation implies that 7 translation must be studied as the behaviour of (people who call themselves or are called) translators, together with the end-results of their behaviour, i.e., translations. This observation can be understood in the following manners, which is expected to help the adoption of a descriptive approach for the present research. On the one hand, if a text can be called appropriately “a translation”, it must satisfy the “necessary and sufficient condition” that there must be a relation that can be definitely perceived as existing between the source text (ST) and the target text (TT) (Chesterman, 1993:3). If we ignore the criterion assumed upon the identification of some mythical “perfect equivalence” (or even “adequate equivalence”) between the two texts in question, we are left with two other means. One means of establishing the translation status of a text is by virtue of the translator claiming that such a relation exists and the receiver of the text accepting the claim. Under ideal, theoretical conditions, the larger the proportion of receivers who agree with the translator’s claim, the stronger the claim becomes. Nevertheless, if the receivers do not agree with the claim, the translation status of the text becomes dubious. In this case, an alternative, more feasible means is necessary. And this is descriptive translation studies. By using the protocol method, this approach studies individual translation texts as products and translation process as a form of human behaviour. Its purpose is to describe and explain any behaviour which leads to something that can be appropriately called a translation. In other words, the approach, similar to other general descriptive laws pertaining to any form of human behaviour, describes what translators (at various levels of translation competence) tend to do under certain given circumstances. 8 On the other hand, the rationality of human translation behaviour is procedural rather than prescriptive or substantive. It is safe to assume that human translators are rational beings. It follows that their translation behaviour is governed by rational decisions. What is meant by rational behaviour is two-fold: the translating action is not only based on some kind of text; it is also determined by the context and goal of the behaviour. Text here is a broad, functional concept “combining verbal and nonverbal elements, situational clues and ‘hidden’ or presumed information” (Nord, 1997:25). Like any text, a text used as ST in the translating process is no longer the first and foremost criterion for the translator’s decisions. Among the various sources of information used by the translator, it may be regarded as an “offer of information” (ibid). Faced with this offer, the translator chooses what s/he regards as interesting, useful or adequate to the desired purpose, and then transfers it into the target culture, making it a new offer of information therein. During this process, the translator can be trusted to make rational choices “heuristically” (Chesterman, 1993:13). These choices are “not fixed in advance in any mathematically precise sense. Instead, they are the “best” options the translator can think of at the time, and represent a combination of his/her “past experience with selective heuristics for reaching a satisfactory choice” (ibid). Behind each rational act is a translation strategy, a potentially conscious procedure for the solution of a problem which [the translator] is faced with when translating a text segment (Lörscher, 1991:76, cited in Cheterman, ibid). Hatim and Mason (1990:12) are right in concluding that “[t]ranslation is a matter of choice, but choice is always motivated: omissions, additions and alterations may indeed be justified but only in relation to indented meaning”. Descriptive translation studies will therefore set out to describe and account for the actual translation choices the translator makes in actual translations. 9 1.2 THE RESEARCH 1.2.1 Focus of the Study Each culture has developed and defined their own sets and system of address terms and the roles they serve in society, and such socio-cultural terms are “rather static objects and linguistic artefacts” (Hatim, 1999:219). It is thus possible, through forms of address, “to understand a culture’s power structure, particular interpersonal communication patterns, and the normative elements of the family system, structure, and functions” (Huang and Jia, 2002). As far as the Chinese HLM is concerned, it contains an abundance of terms of address. Sun (1991) classifies the various terms of address used in the novel into four groups, i.e., titles, kinship terms, honorofics and emotional terms. He then outlines four principles governing the use of these types of terms respectively, by members, relatives and servants of the Jia House in HLM. The four principles are Principle of Social Stratification, Principle of Patriarchal Clan, Principle of Politeness and Principle of Emotion. However, due to limit of space, this study focuses only on two dimensions of the Chinese address terms in the first twelve chapters of HLM and their renderings in the five English versions, i.e. titles and honorifics. These two dimensions pertain to Sun’s Principle of Social Stratification and Politeness Principle respectively. But as will be seen in Section 2.3, since Sun’s Principle of Politeness collates with Gu’s (1990) Self-denigration Maxim, it thus is renamed after Gu as “Principle of Selfdenigration”. What follows is a justification of the research focus. 1.2.1.1 Social Stratification 10 Titles constitute an important aspect of analysis in this study, not only because they count for the most instances of address terms used in HLM (Sun, 1991:191), but also because Chinese and English titles are mostly “false friends”. As will be discussed in Chapter 3 below, since the two Jia branches belong to a peerage (at the rank of the Chinese dukedom) descent beyond the royal family, here one would assume that there is a universal phenomenon of address behaviour in both Chinese and English, especially with reference to members of the peerage family. But if one relates the English and Chinese peerage system to the respective social conditions in which it is contextualised, more differences than similarities can be identified. The superficial universalistic similarities which the caste of the peerage in both English and Chinese shares consist of: (1) the division of peers into five ranks (i.e., Baron, Viscount, Earl, Marquis, and Duke), (2) the conferment of a noble title by a king or queen in Britain and an emperor in old China respectively, (3) the heritability of the title by the eldest son of the conferred, and (4) the customary naming of a place as a territorial designation. Apart from these, Chinese peerage cannot be compared with their British “counterparts”. This is because either legally or politically Chinese peers did not enjoy as many rights and privileges as the British peers did. Officially, the British peerage had and still enjoys status higher than their Chinese “counterparts” did in feudal societies. In England, the Duke is next only to a Prince in status. In old China, say, in the Qing Dynasty (1616-1911) when the HLM story took place, there were six other hereditary imperial nobility ranks in between the Prince and the Dukedom, i.e., Imperial Prince (亲 王 ), Heir of Imperial Prince ( 世子), Commandery Prince ( 郡王 ), Heir of Commandery Prince (长子), Beile (贝勒) and Beile Prince (贝子) (Zhang and Yuan, 1994; Zuo, 1985). 11 Politically, English law recognises a peerage as an incorporeal and impartible hereditament, inalienable and descendable according to the words of limitations in the grant, if any. Peers in Britain used to be the military companions and the tenants-in-chief of the English monarchs. Greater definition of their position and privileges became necessary in the 13th-century with the development of parliamentary institutions. The principle right of a peer is to a seat in the upper house of Parliament, the House of Lords, though a life peerage granted to a woman carried with it no seat in the House of Lords (Wallace, 2002). As a corollary of this right, heirs and younger sons of peers can sit in the House of Commons (ibid). Besides, a peerage in Britain enjoys many other privileges, “although not as many as they once did” (ibid). A peerage has a right to be excused as of right from jury service, a right to be excused from serving as a witness, and freedom from arrest in civil causes, etc. Most of these rights, however, were not privileged to the Chinese peers. For instance, they could not even sit in an imperial counsel, a procedure similar to the British Parliament. They even did not enjoy immunity from civil arrest. As the HLM story tells us, the Jia Mansions were later officially ransacked with all properties confiscated; even all the people in the big family were arrested, with their servants sold. 1.2.1.2 Dimension of Self-denigration Self-denigration involves the use of words or expressions when speaking to and/or about people. This category of terms and their English renditions are investigated because of the peculiar nature of their use as well as the meaning values they embody. Unlike the dimensions of patriarchal clan (i.e., the use of kinship terms) and social stratification, self-denigration is basically reciprocal in nature. Since it operates primarily in 12 interactions between socially equal dyads, such as colleagues, old family friends (i.e., 世交 in Chinese) and acquaintances (Sun, 1991:204), it entails elevating both Other (i.e., the hearer) and the people and things that are associated with Other while depreciating Self (i.e., the speaker) and the people and things on Self’s side (Gu, 1990:246). The phenomenon of politeness whereby showing respect to Other and humility to Self is realised by means of special linguistic expressions is peculiar to Chinese, Japanese, Korean and some other cultures (Yao, 1990:147; Gu, 1992:15). In English, people may convey their respect or courtesy to Other. But they do not have a particular set of terms which share the nature of Chinese other-elevating terms. Instead, they make use of appreciatory epithets (such as “honourable”, “respectable”, “reverend”, etc.) to achieve this purpose. Such epithets, coined provisionally, do not come with the practice of depreciating Self in order to “reciprocate” respect to Other (Yao, 1990:147). As such, rendering the Chinese honorifics in question will understandably pose a challenge to the translators, and thus constitutes our focus. 1.2.2 Adopting Venuti: A Rationale The present study adopts Venuti’s (1995) dichotomy of translations into domesticating and foreignizing (abbreviated as “D-F dichotomy” henceforth) (see 2.1.2.2 for conceptual description) on account of two considerations. The first is an obvious, as well as practical and convenient consideration: it ties in with the ultimate objective of the research to explore how this dichotomy can be effectively used to epitomise translations, or the renditions of the Chinese titles and honorifics under investigation. In Baker’s (1998c:163) words, our goal is to “investigat[e] the evaluative yardstick that is used in 13 making statements about translations in a given socio-cultural context” rather than “attempting to evaluate translations”. The second has to do with the critical emphasis of the dichotomy on the cultural values of translations. This emphasis conforms to the two underlying assumptions of this study: i.e., translating as translating culture, and terms of address as cultural key terms. By adopting terms of address as our foci of analysis, we wish to test how this aspect of translation can be analysed to determine whether they are domesticated or foreignized. It is thus expected that the study obtains “intersubjectively testable” (Toury, 1995:3) generalizations of translator behaviour by comparing versions of the same ST. Since the database of the study encompasses the five English versions of HLM, and since different dichotomies have been employed by previous researchers to label these versions (see 2.2 for detailed review), the use of Venuti’s dichotomy, apart from doing justice to all these labels, expects to supersede them on the basis of objectively generalizable findings derived. 1.2.3 Objectives of the Study Using titles and honorifics as foci, the study aims to contribute to the existing literature on Venuti’s dichotomy of translations in relation to translation strategy by providing new insights through applying it in practical translation analysis on both a theoretical and practical level. As far as the theoretical landscape is concerned, the study intends to have a better understanding of Venuti’s dichotomy, that is, how to conceptualize and examine a translator’s (conscious or subconscious) orientation in handling cultural differences. The practical landscape, on the other hand, consists in the 14 exemplification of how translators domesticates or foreignizes, in different cultural domains, by different means, to different extents, with different degrees of consistency. 1.2.4 Justification of the study This study finds justification from four facets. First of all, it constitutes the first systematic application of Venuti’s D-F conceptualisation. As will be reviewed in the forthcoming chapter, half a dozen terms have been advocated to epitomise translation strategies throughout the history of translation theory. Different as they are in name, they all group translation strategies into an opposing dichotomy, Venuti being no exception. Unfortunately however, no study has been conducted with an aim to examine how these dichotomies can be actualised with support from substantial data. Therefore, this study, by focusing on translations of cultural key words from five versions spanning nearly a century (from the 1890s to the 1980s), commits itself to an analysis to see how translators orientates themselves in handling cultural differences when translating. Secondly, this study distinguishes itself from previous ones which also use as data the English versions of HLM in that it seeks to draw conclusions from intersubjectively testable translation norms with reference to the aspect of translation under investigation, Norms is here used to mean options which “are regularly taken up by translators at a given time and in a given socio-cultural situation” and “represent an intermediate level between competence and performance” (Baker, 1993:239). As will be seen in the Literature Review with respect to previous studies of HLM translations, these studies mostly concern themselves with a contrast and comparison of a modicum of culturallyladen instances from two versions. Such a practice not only apparently presumes an 15 antinomy between the versions under scrutiny. More importantly, the scarcity of data used calls into question the reliability and validity of the conclusions thus derived. In view of these inadequacies, this study not only relies on a larger database, but also involves all the five available versions. The third justification of the study is connected with both the first and second ones spelt out above. That is, it will not only show how to choose some significant domain of cross-cultural difference for case study to substantialize the conceptualisation of the D-F dichotomy. Importantly, this study will devise an analytical framework whereby descriptive analyses can be conducted on the choices under examination for significant conclusions. It is thus expected that this study will also contribute in opening up vistas for the role which a descriptive analysis based on a corpus of source and target texts plays, i.e., its potential in “allow[ing] us to record strategies of translation which are repeatedly opted for, in preference to other strategies, in a given culture or textual system” (Baker, 1993:240). In addition, this study will offer a different perspective from which Chinese titles and honorifics can be re-examined, not only for its own sake, but for the sake of both language teaching and cross-cultural communication. While the way in which one person addresses another and is in turn addressed constitutes a social event of great regularity (Brown, 1965) and forms a part and parcel of the universal phenomenon of politeness, it is insufficient in language instruction “to label a [linguistic] form as a form of politeness and to leave it at that”, just as it is to master the grammatical rule of the language “to get along and be accepted in a foreign culture” (Braun, 1988:63-64). As far as translation is 16 concerned, it raises the issue whether literal transference of an address form is always adequate. To put it another way, whether identifying and signposting a term of address in its context and determining its position within the system of politeness is very informative for a learner or reader. 1.2.5 Hypothesis and questions of the study This study ties up the general nature of a translation with the meaning values of cultural key words of Chinese honorifics. Targeting at its main objective, this study sets out to test the following three inter-related hypotheses: (1) The dynamics of Chinese politeness as conveyed via titles and honorifics can be relayed trans-culturally but will involve some degree of linguistic modification at the level of texture. (2) The more meaning or cultural values a rendition acquires, the nearer it is orientated to the meaning values of its ST counterpart. In contrast, the fewer meaning values a rendition scores, the farther away it is orientated from the meaning values of the ST original. And as a corollary, (3) A foreignizing strategy results in renditions which are orientated to the meaning values of their ST counterparts whereas a domesticating strategy in renditions orientated away from the meaning values of their ST original. In line with its objectives and hypotheses, the research tries to find answers to the following questions: 17 (1) How do the translators concerned orientate themselves respectively to foreignization or domestication while dealing with the CKW in question? (2) To what degree do the translators foreignize or domesticate their renditions of the specific CKW and whether their approaches are consistent? (3) Is there any consistent pattern in the kinds of meaning values perceived in the ST titles and honorifics which are perforce omitted in translation? 1.3 HONG LOU MENG 1.3.1 The Story Generally considered to be an autobiographical account of the writer’s life, the standard 120-chapter novel HLM is “a blend of realism and romance, psychological motivation and fate, daily life and supernatural occurrences” (NEB, 1994:218). Its story takes place mainly domestically, within the enclosure of family compound called Jia Fu (贾府) or The Jia Mansion, the predilection for the closed world of what seems to be a heavenly garden, the glory and luxury of which is depicted in closely observed detail. As “a complex novel” (Hsia, 1996:257), it describes “30 main characters” and involved “more than 400 minor ones” (NEB, 1994:218). Although the story details the decline of the Jia family, composed of two main branches, with a proliferation of kinsmen and servants, it primarily focuses on the ill-fated triangular love affair between Baoyu (宝玉), the gifted but obstinate heir of the clan, and his two beautiful cousins, i.e. the melancholy Daiyu (黛玉), daughter of his father’s sister, and the vivacious Baochai (宝钗), daughter of his mother’s sister. The (en)tangled romance ends with Daiyu’s death in despair while her 18 rival Baochai, under the arrangement of the paramount Grandmother Jia, or Lady Dowager (Yangs, 1978), steps onto the wedding carpet with Baoyu, who eventually “perfunctorily discharg[es] his worldly duties” and “pursues the path of holy indifference” (Hsia, 1996:288). Because of the karmic relation of a magic stone (通灵宝玉) to the hero Baoyu – of which he is an incarnation, and with which he was born – the novel HLM is also called 《石头记》Shi Tou Ji, or The Story of the Stone as Hawkes (1973) renders it. The nearly one million words HLM people lay hands on today is mostly a combination of eighty chapters of what has been deemed Cao Xue-qin’s (1724-1764) original manuscript entitled Shi Tou Ji and 40 chapters of continuation believed to be written by Gao E (高鹗) when it was first published in 1791-1792. 1.3.2 English Translations 1.3.2.1 General introduction The allegorical and marvellous framework of HLM brings a colouring more Buddhist than Taoist to the work, playing on the reality and fiction underlying the sufferings that threaten when the enjoyment of life in the enchanted world of childhood and adolescence comes to an end. It goes without saying that this seems a radically original novel to the western reader: the development of feelings of love in a doomed and unauthentic world. This is perhaps owing to the belief that “the greatest love stories have no time or place” (Doren, 1958:viii). With translations into eighteen languages, in fiftythree versions, abridged and complete (Zhu, 1997:303) up to date, HLM can be said to be the only Chinese literary work that has enjoyed such international popularity. The proliferation of one foreign novel into so many translations might indicate the interest the 19 readers in the target languages show in the novel and justify Doren’s (1958:viii) comparison of the Baoyu-and-Daiyu tragedy to that of Romeo-and-Juliet. Since this study is concerned with a comparison of five English translations of the novel, an introduction to these translations will be presented. While the term “version” is defined synonymously as “translation”, it is necessary to differentiate between the various foreign language versions into which HLM has been transformed in the last couple of centuries. The distinction that is made here is “adapted” or “abridged” translations versus “complete” or “integral” ones. As is obvious from the modifiers, an adapted/abridged version is a translation that is made based upon a shortened version of the original, which may be abridged by the translator him/herself or by others. In contrast, a complete/integral translation loosely refers to one that renders the original work in an unabridged manner. This distinction is necessary because it is virtually impossible to have access to as many instances of renditions for the titles and honorifics in the abridged versions as it is in the complete ones. 1.3.2.2 Abridged versions Attempts at transforming the Chinese novel into English in one way or another can be traced back to the 1840s when Robert Tom, the British consul in Ningbo, translated several extracts of it and got them published as manuals for British citizens learning Mandarin in the Ningbo journal The Chinese Speaker ( 《 中 国 话 》 ) (Hu, 1993:130). This epoch-making undertaking, which initiated the introduction of the Chinese classic, should be attributed to the “China fever” prevalent in Europe at the time (He, 2001:4). An English version of the HLM story, according to Birch (1959:378), “is 20 destined to be something of a landmark”. And the first attempt to make the HLM story accessible to the western mind in an abridged format is Wang Liangzhi (王良志)3 in 1927. Focusing on the love affair of Baoyu and Daiyu, he adapted and translated the novel into a 600,000 word, 95-chapter story, and had it published in New York (Hu, 1993:131). Unfortunately however, neither this work nor studies of it are accessible here. Not long after this attempt, “suddenly two landmarks [of English HLM] rear[ed] themselves in the same spot” (Birch, 1959:386). On the one hand, another Chinese scholar, Chi-Chen Wang (王际真), a professor of Chinese at the University of Columbia, got his revised and enlarged English abridgement of Dream of the Red Chamber published in New York in 1958. According to Hu (1993:131), this work is still deemed with praise and republished several times, and Chi-Chen Wang is thus credited to have contributed greatly to the introduction and promotion of HLM to the vast western readership. Arthur Waley, the doyen of English translations of many Chinese classics (e.g., Journey West (《西游记》)) prefaced Wang’s earlier (1929) edition by saying: It only remains to assure the reader that in Mr. Wang’s hands he will be perfectly safe. The translation is singularly accurate, and the work of adaptation skilfully performed” (cited in Doren, 1958:ix) As for the lengthened second edition, Hawkes acknowledges it as excelling in many aspects, especially in story-telling (Lin, 1976:1), while Doren (1958:viii-ix) adores it succinctly: 3 While the Chinese name of the translator is Wang Liangzhi ( 王良志 )，I doubt whether the English translation of the name per se followed the standard Chinese spelling system as such since no other reference to either the translator or his work available. 21 It is agreeable to remember now the words of so great an authority and to realize that with the passage of nearly thirty years Mr. Wang, in addition to doubling the length of his text, has so perfected his style that the inimitable spirit of the original comes to us freely and fully, with neither let nor hindrance nor any least disloyalty of voice. On the other hand, another concurrent attempt in the English-speaking world to make the Chinese novel accessible to western readers was under way. This time it was conducted by two native speakers of English, the McHugh sisters, Florence and Isabel. Entitled The Dream of the Red Chamber and also published in the U.S., there are two things about this attempt that deserve mentioning here. One is that this English translation is based on an abridged German version by Franz Kuhn (1884-1961) published in 1932, rather than a first-hand adaptation and subsequent translation from the Chinese original. The reason why the McHugh sisters adopted this version as their “ST” might be more accountable by the fact that Kuhn’s German abridgement has enjoyed more popular recognition in Europe than any other such attempt before (Zhou, 2000:318), than by the fact that the McHugh sisters cannot speak or read Chinese. Indeed, Kuhn’s work has been adopted as “the original” and translated into French, Italian, Dutch and Hungarian, besides this English one (Li, 1994:328; Zhou, 2000:318). The other thing worthy of special notice about the McHugh sisters’ version is that it ironically “calls the kettle black”. In the “Introduction” to their work by Kuhn (who is also the translator of Jin Ping Mei or Plum in the Golden Vase (《金瓶梅》), another vernacular Chinese classic novel), Bencraft Joly’s (1892-93) seminal attempt in translating into English the first fifty-six chapters of the same novel (to be discussed shortly) is criticised as “not even reach[ing] the halfway point of the original”, while Chi-Chen Wang’s 1929 work is charged with “cover[ing] barely one-fourth of my [Kuhn’s] version, and, particularly in its later part, [being] more in the nature of an abstract than a translation” (Kuhn, 1958:xiv). However, 22 critics point out that Kuhn’s work is far from the asserted five-sixths of the original. Instead, this assertion can only “be intended to imply ‘five-sixths of [the action of] the original” (Birch, 1959:386). In fact it is no more than a condensed adaptation of the original into fifty chapters (forty-five out of the first one hundred, and five out of the final twenty) (Li, 1994:328), which amounts to “280,000 words” (Birch, 1959:387). 1.3.2.3 Complete translations Whereas the aforementioned adaptors and translators should be credited for making effort in introducing the Chinese novel to the vast English readership, they should also be excused for the incompleteness that lies in their work. Given the constraints set by their respective publishers and editors, and the enormity of time and energy the translating requires, these translators have all surmounted formidable heights in producing whatever amount of translation of the Chinese original. Just imagine that both Yangs and Hawkes spent around ten years consulting latest findings in studies of HLM, clarifying numerous inconsistencies and mysteries, and securing their understanding, just in order to produce a complete translation of the novel. In this perspective, Birch (1959:387) seems justified in saying that these translators “have done real service to a world masterpiece, and…should and will be read, and read widely.” However, seen from a purely translational perspective, any abridgement of the original will unavoidably lead to elimination of a number of details of compelling interest, just as any adaptation will undoubtedly result in loss, even betrayal, of the genuine, exotic flavour of the original. According to Birch (ibid:387), the loss of Wang and McHugh’s abridged translations are “surprising”. It is in this vein that both Yangs and Hawkes’s 23 120-chapter complete translations are most admired. This is so because only when a translated literary work carries with it both its narrative appeal and its unique artistry can it then be expected to acquire status and recognition as a literary work in the target culture and society. For the real literary enthusiasts of foreign works, the second most original, enjoyable, insightful and informed appreciation, next only to reading the original, is reserved for the privileged few undertakings derived from a faithful and complete reproduction of the originals. The following constitutes an introduction of the three such undertakings. 1.3.2.3.1 Joly’s translation The first attempt at a full translation of HLM bore fruit in 1892-93 when the first fifty-six chapters – under the title of Hung Lou Meng or The Dream of the Red Chamber, A Chinese Novel – was published in Hong Kong. This translation is the work of H. Bencraft Joly (known as 乔利 in the Chinese translators and redologists’ circles), British vice-consulate to Macao (Hu, 1993:130; Lin, 1976:1). According to Joly (1892-93: Preface), his endeavour was suggested not by any pretensions to range among the ranks of the body of sinologues, but by the perplexities and difficulties experienced by [him] as a student in Peking, when at the completion of the Tzu Erh Chi, [he] had to plunge in the maze of the Hung Lou Meng. As the first complete though uncompleted translation into a western language, Joly’s work “represents the highest achievement in the translation of HLM in the nineteenth century” (Hu, 1993:130). Unfortunately, however, despite his ambitious intention of “affording a helping hand to present and future students of the Chinese 24 languages” (Joly, 1892:Preface), Joly failed to present the English-reading audience a full version of the HLM story, the reason of which is anybody’s guess (He, 2001:6). 1.3.2.3.2 Yangs’ translation Credited as “the doyens of translation into English” (Hu, 1993:133; Hung and Pollard, 1998:373), Chinese scholar and translator Yang Xianyi (杨宪益) (or Yang Hsienyi as known to English readers) and his British wife Gladys Yang (戴乃迭) (both of whom are collectively abbreviated as “Yangs” hereafter), started their translation careers in the 1940s. Officially designated to translate Chinese classics into English, the husband-andwife professionals also undertook to translate into Chinese western (mainly Latin, Greek and English) masterpieces. During their half century co-operative endeavour, they have produced millions of words of translation, including classic Chinese writings HLM (A Dream of Red Mansions), The Scholars ( 《 儒 林 外 史 》 ), Elegy of Chu ( 《 楚 词 》 ), Selections from the Records of the Historian (《史记》) and Mr Decadent (《老残游记》), and classics from Greek (e.g., Prometheus Bound, Odyssey, Birds) as well as English (e.g., Pygmalion, Modern English Poetry) (Ren, 1993:33; Yang, 1986:40-1). This might justify the assertion that “the work of this prolific team…has greatly contributed to the reputation of these titles” (Wickeri, 2000:223). And these productions are derived from their purported “dialectic” perspective towards Chinese and foreign literary and cultural heritage: “While foreigners should know something about Chinese legacies, the best of western cultural heritage should be introduced to Chinese, too” (Ren, 1993:33; Yang, 1986:41). Besides, Yangs also claim to be strictly committed to both the meaning and form of the original, and are adamant that “a translation is a translation”, “entailing no 25 superfluous explanation or explication” (Ren:35). Therefore, they are strongly opposed to the adaptive practice whereby either the meaning or the form of the ST is sacrificed so as to conform to the form of the TL. As far as their translation of HLM is concerned, the few accessible studies of their work mostly attribute compliments to it, with only He as an exception who claims that despite the faithfulness Yangs show in their translation, their work “relates in a dull, flat style, leaving the impression that it reads like boiled water” (2001:101). 1.3.2.3.3 Hawkes’s translation David Hawkes (1923-), with the Chinese name 霍克思, is a learned sinologist (Hu, 1993:132). He resigned from the post of professor of Chinese studies at Oxford University in order to devote himself wholeheartedly to the translation of HLM (Lin, 1976:2). However, he only undertook to translate the first eighty chapters, leaving Gao E’s forty chapters of supplement untouched as being “fraudulent invention” and “alterations” of (Hawkes, 1989:160), and “in many respects… perhaps inferior to” what Cao Xueqin would have written (ibid, 1973:18). It is his son-in-law John Minford who resumed the undertaking by rendering the final forty chapters into English, and had them published in two volumes in 1982 and 1986 (Zheng, 1993:9; Zhu, 1997:303). Hawkes, who is credited as being “one of the most distinguished contemporary translators from the Chinese” and who “on everything he has put his hand to…has combined rigorous scholarship with literary grace” (Minford, 2000:xi), set himself several harsh standards for achieving a satisfactory translation, a glimpse of which can be acquired from what he (Hawkes, 1973:46; original emphasis) had to say: 26 My one abiding principle has been to translate everything – even puns. For…this [novel] was written (and rewritten) by a great artist with his very lifeblood. I have therefore assumed that whatever I find in it is there for a purpose and must be dealt with somehow or other. I cannot pretend always to have done so successfully, but if I can convey to the reader even a fraction of the pleasure this Chinese novel has given me, I shall not have lived in vain. In passing, Wu’s (2000:233) remarks about Hawkes’s (and Minford’s as well) translation of HLM are cited: “this translation is excellent in diction, tone, and style”, and it thus “sets a new standard for the translation of Chinese novels.” In comparison of Hawkes and Minford’s work with that of Yangs, Wu (ibid:234) even claims that the former’s “achievement is so superior” that the latter’s “seems pale in comparison”. 1.4 IMPLICATIONS OF THE STUDY This descriptive and comparative study may have the following implications. The first as well as the most significant consists in its theoretical contribution to translation theories. It will provide insight into better understanding of the concepts (and the dichotomy) of domestication and foreignization. Through detailed analysis and comparison of the translations in hand, we shall see how the concepts can be effectively used to epitomise translations with reference to cultural difference in translation. The second implication of the study lies in its obvious insight into research of the English translations of the Chinese classic HLM. Up to now, there has not been any systematic and comprehensive comparison/contrast of the five translations. The tiny amount of work (see Table 1.5 below) that has been done in this respect is piteously restricted to sporadic analysis of fragments taken from a couple of versions (mainly Yangs and Hawkes’s), such as a passage, a poem or verse, or even an idiomatic expression. Most of these studies not only fail to provide a well-developed framework of analysis, but also stop short of 27 problematicizing the labels they adopt to categories the versions under investigation. This study will contribute by showing how to choose some significant domain of cross-cultural difference as a case of study, how to devise an analytical framework and conduct close analyses on the translation practices under examination. Table 1.1 Previous studies into the translations of HLM Study Year Lin 1976 Research Focus RED ( 红 ) and GREEN ( 绿 ), puns, terms of Major Findings good points coexist with bad 4 address, etc. in H Chen 1982 some poems and idioms in two versions Y more appropriate than H Wu 1984 some poems in two versions Y is more likeable Han 1986 some person names and idioms in Y these not adequately rendered Yang 1986 general recount of Yangs’ principles they are hard-working Ren 1993 general recount of Yangs’ principles they are great translators Zheng 1993 translation of metaphors in two versions Y seems better than H Ke Wenli 1995 the translation of RED (红) in H unwise and unacceptable Hong 1996 cultural filtering in two versions Y semantic, H communicative Hong 1996 some idioms, customs in two versions H’s better in amplification Liu & Gu 1997 translation of some cultural words Y semantic, H communicative Zhu 1997 some poems and verses in two versions both are good Hong 1998 adaptations and equivalent effect H made more adaptations Hong 2001 some linguistic and cultural aspects successful domestication Chen 2001 H’s translation of some poems Wonderful He 2001 5 renditions of cultural phenomena H is domesticating, J foreignizing Yuan 2001 some idioms translated in Y only a pot on a pearl Wang 2002 translation of chapter titles in two versions H is better than Y Thirdly, this study will also contribute to the literature on cross-cultural studies in the field of terms of address. Huang and Jia (2002:1-2) bemoan that, while both the study of address as a universal phenomenon and the study of Chinese address terms, especially Chinese kinship “seem to have been traditional topics in western anthropology”, “no scholarly literature on Chinese kinship terms from an explicitly defined communicative 4 Due to limit of space, H is used to stand for Hawkes’s translation, J for Joly’s, and Y for Yangs’. 28 perspective has been found”. Suffice it to say that no research in this field has been done from the perspective of translation studies, i.e., to compare and contrast the differences in the use of address terms and the values embodied by these terms in terms of cross-cultural communication. Whereas the Invariant Norm of Address (Brown, 1965) “constitutes a culturally universal rule” (Kroger et al, 1979:395), the linguistic realisation of politeness varies from culture. As far as honorifics are concerned, they even deserve both caution and recognition in cross-cultural communication due to their unique meaning values, performative functions and underlying strategies of application. This research thus not only contributes to the understanding of the unique cultural meanings and communicative functions of some of the Chinese honorifics involved, but also helps to throw light on intercultural communication with respect to Chinese language learning and Chinese-English translation. For second language learners, “the mastering of grammatical rules is not enough to get along and be accepted in a foreign culture” (Braun, 1988:63). Braun (ibid) reminds us that, imperfect knowledge and the subsequent handling of communication style and/or terms of address “can still, if unconsciously, evoke misunderstanding or irritation”. Ervin-Tripp (1986:232), on the other hand, advises us that [While] language, address terms, pronominal selection, or verb suffixing…can be consciously controlled more readily…and taught by rule specification to children and newcomers…[f]orms which allow specific exceptions, or which have options so that too great or too little frequency might be conspicuous, cannot be taught deliberately so easily. Such rules can be acquired by newcomers only by long and intense exposure rather than formal teaching. Unfortunately, however, despite their enormous social relevance, terms of address in general as an integral part and parcel of politeness linguistic phenomena, “are often 29 neglected in foreign language instruction” (Braun, 1988:63). The findings of this study can thus be used as some informative material for learners interested in interlingual or cross-cultural communication. And finally, this study also has more general, if indirect, methodological significance of its own. According to Brown and Ford (1961:375), to discover the norms of address in any language requires a large sample of usage: the range of the subject population should be vast and the uniformity must be great. Compared with other studies on language usage, studies in the forms of address “do not share the sources of error inherent in paper-and-pencil and experimental procedures” (Kroger et al, 1979:397). This is so because they are easily recordable with accuracy, and in sufficient detail to yield, upon analysis, the latent structuring dimension or rules underlying address usage. This is even truer of samples taken from literary works. Compared with other forms of literature, like fairy tales and poetry, there are more instances of address in novels and plays (Brown and Ford, 1961:375). While these materials are not a record of actual speech from the characters named but are the speech constructed for such characters by writers (ibid), it is most probable that writers actually reproduce the true norms of address. In addition, to study address behaviour in times of antiquity, the most reliable source might just lie in literary works rather than dictionaries of the past. 1.5 STRUCTURE OF THE PAPER This dissertation is composed of six chapters. Chapter 1 presents introductory information in several aspects. It commences from an argumentation for an integrative 30 view of culture, language, and translation, with a view to validate the adoption of Chinese titles and honorifics as culture-specific items on which this study focuses. This argumentation is followed by a presentation of the objectives, questions, and hypotheses of the present research. A section is also devoted to a brief introduction of the five versions of HLM, with focus on background information concerning their translators as well as their motivations for the translating. At the end of this chapter the implications of the present study is discussed. Chapter 2 is a review of the relevant literature in this study. It consists of two main fields of research. The first concerns major dichotomies of translation strategies which have been recurrent in translation studies. The purpose of this review is to show how the historical development of translation strategies has been stereotypically modelled on the opposing dichotomy of free-literal translation and how Venuti’s dichotomy of domestication-foreignization comes up as supersession of its predecessors. Following this review is a brief touch on previous studies of the English translations of HLM, with special reference to their methodology and labels of versions concerned. The second focus of this review is a look at cross-cultural approaches to terms of address by contextualizing them into the broad landscape of the politeness phenomenon. Special attention is here paid to Gu’s social pragmatic approach to address terms due to their explicability of the variables governing the use of specific address terms. Towards the end of the chapter is the methodology construction of this study. It consists of a an introduction of the framework adapted on Gu’s Maxims of Address and Self-denigration, and the procedures by which the cultural values contained in the Chinese titles and honorifics in the ST and in their respective renditions in the five English versions are 31 explicated and compared, with an aim to identify the strategies which might have been used for these renditions. Chapters 3 and 4 are both devoted to an investigation of the eight major titles that are used to designate people’s social status both as terms of address and reference and their English renditions in the five versions. In both chapters, the frameworks used for the analysis are Gu’s Address Maxim which is responsible for the factors governing the choice of titles. While Chapter 3 is concerned with an examination of the different renditions the five translators offer for the four titles that are exclusively employed to the female masters in the prestigious Jia House, Chapter 4 centre on the four titles that are used primarily to male Jia masters and their English renditions. In Chapter 5 a lump sum of thirty-five honorific expressions that appear in the data base and their English renditions are investigated. These honorifics can be further divided into two categories. Different from Chapters 3 and 4, the methodology applied for this analysis is Gu’s Self-denigration Maxim, with special focus on the reciprocal nature of Other-elevating and Self-denigrating honorifics. Based upon our analyses in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, discussions are made in Chapter 6 with respect to our findings and their implications. It will first summarize the findings of the study, with focus on the practicability of Venuti’s domestication-foreignizing dichotomy, and for that matter, other dichotomies as well, in categorizing translations with reference to culture-specific items, and on the nature of the five English versions in terms of the strategies whereby the titles and honorifics are dealt with. The chapter will end with a discussion of possible areas and aspects in which future research should be 32 conducted to further enrich our understanding of translation strategies in general, and versions of HLM in specific. 33 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 2.0 OVERVIEW Based on the integrative view of language and culture, the foregoing chapter has established that translating means translating culture. This chapter starts with a brief review of the development of different strategies whereby translations are presumably made. By highlighting both the similarities and differences between these strategies, this review aims to lend further justifications to our adoption of Venuti’s cultural approach to translation studies. Following this review is an examination of the limited number of studies that have been done into the English translations of HLM with reference to some of the strategies as labels. The examination will show that, not only are these studies conducted in an unsystematic manner and mostly concerned with two translations in opposition. More importantly, little attention has been paid to the renditions of titles and honorifics. It is these inadequacies that necessitate the present study. Since the use of address forms has been conveniently identified as the most obvious indices to linguistic politeness, general theories of politeness will then be discussed. After this discussion is a review of cross-cultural studies of English and Chinese address forms, which serves to justify our adaptation of Gu’s pragmatic approach, and our adoption of both Gu and 孙炜 as frameworks for the encapsulation of values of the usage of Chinese titles and 34 honorifics and their various English renditions. Towards the end of the chapter, both the frameworks and methodology for data analysis are spelt out. 2.1 TRANSLATION STRATEGIES A translation strategy, in Chesterman’s (1993:13) words, is “a potentially conscious procedure for the solution of a problem which an individual is faced with when translating a text segment from one language into another.” In this vein, strategies are represented by “forms of explicitly textual manipulation” and are thus “directly observable from the translation product itself, in comparison with the source text” (ibid, 1997:89). Throughout the history of translation studies, different but binary strategies have emerged and evolved. In the pre-linguistic Roman era, the traditional opposition between strategies is best summed up in the words of Cicero (106-46 BC), “a translation should be free…a translation should be literal” (House, 1981:2). This paradox is later substituted by the modern terms of alienating vs. naturalising (Schleiermacher, 1813/1992), the contemporary terms of formal vs. dynamic equivalence (Nida, 1964), textual vs. formal equivalence (Catford, 1965), and semantic vs. communicative translation (Newmark, 1981), and the present buzzwords of domesticating vs. foreignizing. In accordance with the subject matter on which they focus on, the dichotomies can be roughly categorised into two groups, i.e., linguistic as against cultural, as spelt out in Venuti (1998c:315): In the 1990s, as translation begins to emerge as a scholarly discipline in its own right, two rather different paradigms appear to be driving research. On the one hand is an approach that can generally be called text linguistics, in which notions of equivalence are grounded on the 35 classification of text types and functions. On the other hand is an approach that can generally be called CS [cultural studies], which is concerned with how values, ideologies, and institutions shape practices differently in different historical periods. Strategies which typify the linguistic approach include, apart from the ancient free and literal dichotomy, Nida’s formal and dynamic equivalence, Catford’s textual and formal equivalence, and Newmark’s semantic and communicative translation. By contrast, the cultural approach is based on Schleiermacher’s alienating vs. naturalising and represented by Venuti’s foreignizing and domescating. Since this study adopts as a springboard Venuti’s cultural dichotomy of translation strategies, a review of his contribution in “reviv[ing]” (Bennett, 1995:127; Venuti, 2000:341) and ‘superced[ing]” (Barbe, 1996:333) the ancient thematic controversy over word-for-word (literal) and sense-for-sense (free) translation (Munday, 2001:18) and its historical developments is indispensable. It will not only serve to further justify our adoption of his dichotomy as an umbrella term to cover the various dichotomies with which previous researchers label the five versions of HLM. More importantly, it will serve as a backdrop against which our eventual evaluation of the ad hoc dichotomy will be made. Following this review, previous studies that have been done into the English translations of HLM are briefly reviewed with reference to their labelling of the translations in terms of strategies used. 2.1.1 Linguistic Dichotomies Linguistic dichotomies typify their approach to translation as “simply a question of replacing the linguistic units of ST with ‘equivalent’ TL units without reference to factors such as context or connotation” (Shuttleworth and Cowie, 1997:94). Central to this approach is the concept of translation equivalence or TE in short. First introduced by Jakobson (1959/2000) (i.e., “equivalence in difference”), the concept refers to “the 36 relationship between an ST and its TT that allows the TT to be considered as a translation of the ST in the first place” (Kenny, 1998:77). Historically, this approach finds expression in the following conceptualisations. 2.1.1.1 Literal and Free Translation The taxonomy of literal and free translation, “established within the Roman system, has continued to be a point for debate in one way or another right up to the present” (Bassnett, 1988:39). According to Barbe (1996:330), such a distinction is made due to the translators and theorists’ “obvious bias” “towards superiority of the original as something pure, unattainable, unreachable”. Originally “called word-for-word translation by Cicero…and virtually everyone thereafter” (Robinson, 1998b:125), literal translation refers to a strategy whereby the translator segments the ST into individual words and then renders the word-segments into the TL one at a time (ibid). In contrast, free translation – which is “[t]ypically…opposed to faithful translation” (Robinson, 1998a:87), and which also goes back to Cicero who uses the term sense-for-sense instead in the “sterile” debate over the “triad” of literal, free and faithful translation – focuses on the “sense” and style of the SL in order to “produc[e] an aesthetically pleasing and creative text in the TL” (Munday, 2001:20). Linguistically, literal translations are characterised as texts “made on a level lower than is sufficient to convey the content unchanged while observing TL norms” (Shuttleworth and Cowie, 1997:95), while free translations as texts “made on a level higher than is necessary” for such a purpose (ibid:62). A literalist approach attempts to find both meanings given to corresponding symbols and ways in which such symbols are arranged in phrases and sentences. A free approach, on the other hand, often entails 37 more attention to be paid in producing a naturally reading TT than to preserve the ST wording intact. Barbe (1996:335), however sees the literal-free dichotomy “represent[s] only rather inaccurate and questionable descriptive terms, and do not constitute a real distinction”. This is exemplified by the various terminologies later theorists coined in their attempts to “break out of the dichotomy” (ibid:331), for instance, those by Schleiermacher, Catford, and Nida, etc. With regard to the application of literal-free translation, Barbe (ibid:335) concludes that the purported literal approach only finds its way in the domain of scientific, technical texts, i.e., “texts which supposedly would not allow metaphors or irony”. In contrast, free translation gets expression in the translation of poetry, literature, that is, “texts which allow metaphors, irony and the like” (ibid). However, literal translation can only rarely reproduce the sense or meaning because it is strictly bound to the single word, just as free translation fails to capture the essence of the word, i.e., that what is there but not communicable. 2.1.1.2 Formal and dynamic equivalence The “inviolability of the original” (Barbe, 1996:330) gets adequate expression in modern translation theory in that TE becomes the fundamental criterion of translation quality assessment (House, 2001a:246). Nida (1964) “discard[s]” (Munday, 2001:41) the old terms of literal and free in an attempt “to point the road away from strict word-forword equivalence” (ibid:42). Instead, he introduces the concepts of formal and dynamic equivalence. For him, formal equivalence is achieved by a faithful reproduction of ST form elements. In his own words, it “focuses attention on the message itself, in both form 38 and content” and is “concern[ed] with such correspondence as poetry to poetry, sentence to sentence, and concept to concept” (Nida, 1964:159). A translator who strives for this equivalence will not join or split ST sentences, but rather preserve formal indicators such as punctuation marks and paragraph breaks (ibid:165). Such a strategy frequently results in a type of translation that “distorts the grammatical and stylistic patterns of the receptor language, and hence distorts the message” (Nida and Tiber, 1969:201). That is, something of a “gloss translation” with close but “decontextualised” approximation to ST structure which often necessitates the inclusion of numerous footnotes in order to make the text comprehensible to the TL reader (Shuttlewoth and Cowie, 1997:62). Dynamic equivalence, in contrast, is based upon what Nida calls “the principle of equivalent effect” in Bible translation (1964:159) and refers to the quality which characterises a TT in which the message of the ST is so “transported” into the TL that the response is “essentially” like that of the original receptors (Nida and Taber, 1969:200). To achieve such an effect, the translator has to go through a threefold process of analysis, transfer and restructuring (ibid), which in turn “entails such procedures as substituting TL items which are culturally appropriate for obscure ST items, making linguistically implicit ST information explicit, and building a certain amount of redundancy” (Shuttleworth and Cowie, 1997:47). A case in point here is the translation of the Bible phrase “Lamb of God” into an Eskimo language as “Seal of God” since lambs are unknown in polar regions. This highlights his “aim at complete naturalness of expression” and his endeavour “to relate the receptor to modes of behaviour relevant within the context of his [sic] culture” (Nida and Taber, 1969:168-173). Nida even operationalizes this equivalence as comprising equal “informativeness” and “intelligibility” (House, 39 2001a:244), and suggests the use of TT cloze tests, alternative TT versions for comparison, and reading aloud techniques, etc., to measure the degree of comprehensibility and intelligibility (Nida and Taber, 1969:168-173). Nida’s formal and dynamic equivalence has made crucial contribution in introducing a receptor (or reader-based) orientation to translation theory. Moreover, his detailed description of real translation phenomena and situations constitutes an important “rejoinder” to the vague writings on translation that have preceded it (Munday, 2001:43). In fact, his systematic linguistic approach to translation has been influential on many subsequent and prominent translation scholars, among them are Newmark (to be discussed shortly) in the U.K. and Koller in Germany (see e.g., Koller, 1989, 1995) (Munday, 2001:43). However, both his principle of equivalent effect and his concept of equivalence have come under criticism. For instance, while Lefevere (1993:7) feels that Nida’s equivalence is overly concerned with the word level, Broeck (1978:40), Larose (1989:78), Al-Qinai (2000:498), and House (2001a:244), among others, dispute the possibility of equivalent effect or response. Venuti (1995:118) even unequivocally lashes out at Nida’s concept of dynamic equivalence “as an egregious euphemism for the domesticating translation method and the cultural, political agenda it conceals”. Specifically, he (ibid:21) pinpoints Nida’s concept “naturalness of expression” as “signal[ing] the importance of a fluent strategy to [his] theory of translation” which obviously involves domestication. And by relating to Nida’s work in Bible translation, Venuti (ibid) claims that “Nida’s concept of dynamic equivalence in fact links the translator to the missionary” (p.22) and that it “goes hand in hand with an evangelical zeal that seeks to impose on English-language readers a specific dialect of English as well 40 as a distinctly Christian understanding of the Bible” (p.23). Gentzler shares the same sentiment when he “denigrates Nida’s work for its theological and proselytising standpoint” (Munday, 2001:43). 2.1.1.3 Formal correspondence and textual equivalence Driven by his attempt “to obviate the confusion inherent in the loose terms wordfor-word, literal, sense-for-sense” (Robinson, 1998b:125), Catford takes up translation equivalence as both “a key term” and “a central task” (1965:21). This is obvious in his definition of translation as merely “the replacement of textual material in one language by equivalent textual material in another language” (ibid:20). He distinguishes such equivalents into formal correspondence and textual equivalence. For him (ibid:27), formal correspondence designates a relationship which exists when a TL syntactic category (units, class, structure, element of structure, etc.) can be found which occupies the “same” place in the “economy” of the TL as the given SL category occupies in the SL. This equivalence, however, is just a theoretical, systemic category established on the basis of a formal comparison of SL and TL, because, due to the inevitable incompatibilities between the systems of the two languages involved, the correspondence “is nearly always approximate rather than absolute” (Shuttleworth and Cowie, 1997:60). By contrast, a textual equivalence consists in “any TL text or portion of text which is observed on a particular occasion” using methods of matching equivalent forms. According to Catford (1965:27-28), such equivalence can be identified either “on the authority of a competent bilingual informant or translator”, or more formally by commutation, or changing items in the ST and observing “what changes if any occur in the TL text as a consequence.” 41 Like Nida’s approach, Catford’s “narrowly linguistic approach tends to stress that translation involves the transfer of ‘meaning’ contained in one set of language signs into another set of language signs” (Ke, 1995:24). Snell-Hornby (1988:20) criticises him for his invention of “isolated and even absurdly simplistic” sentences to exemplify his categories of translational equivalence. Kenny (1998:79) charges his textual equivalence with “say[ing] very little about the nature of equivalence”, asserting that it can only find “application in areas such as simple and statistics-based machine translation”. 2.1.1.4 Semantic and Communicative Translation Newmark, although influenced by Nida’s approach, dismisses his concept of equivalent effect as “illusory” (1981:38). He (ibid) reiterates that “the conflict of loyalties, the gap between emphasis on source and target language will always remain as the overriding problem in translation theory and practice.” To bridge the gap, he advocates semantic and communicative strategies as solutions. For him (ibid:39), a communicative translation is measured by means of its attempt “to produce on its reader an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original”. The emphasis of such a translation is on conveying the message of the ST in form which conforms to the linguistic, cultural and pragmatic conventions of TL instead of “mirroring” the actual words of ST as closely as possible without infringing the TL norms (Shuttleworth and Cowie, 1997:22). A semantic translation, on the other hand, is marked by “attempts to render, as closely as the semantic and syntactic structures of the second language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original” (ibid). Interestingly, although Newmark claims that the “basic difference” between semantic and literal translation lies in that “the former respects context, the latter does not” (1981:63), he admits that literal translation 42 should be held “not only as the best” but also “the only valid method of translation” (ibid:39). Critics of Newmark generally charge him with strong prescriptivism in his approach (which, however, is also true of all linguistic or equivalence-based approaches (Baker, 1993)). Specifically, Munday (2001:44) sees his communicative translation as resembling Nida’s dynamic equivalence in the effect it is trying to create on the TT reader on the one hand, and his semantic translation as bearing similarities to Nida’s formal equivalence on the other hand. 2.1.2 Cultural Dichotomies It is obvious that the various equivalence-based dichotomies, by “presuppos[ing] a symmetry between languages” (Snell-Hornby, 1988:16), “distorts the basic problems of translation” (ibid) in that it reduces the translational process to a mere linguistic exercise, ignoring cultural, textual and other situational factors which play an essential role in translation (Shuttleworth and Cowie, 1997:50). And this is in addition to the illusive or imprecise nature of equivalence assumed between SL and TL texts or smaller linguistic units. Cultural strategies, however, are “sensitive to cultural as well as linguistic factors” in translation (ibid:35). In this approach, translation is seen as a process which occurs between cultures rather than simply between languages. Such sensitivity is signified either by presenting TL recipients with a “transparent” (Venuti, 1995:1) text which informs them about elements of the source culture, or by finding items in the TL which may in some way be considered culturally “equivalent” to the ST items in question. This 43 cultural awareness finds expression first in Schleiermacher’s alienating-naturalising dichotomy, and then in Venuti’s foreignizing-domesticating dichotomy. 2.1.2.1 Alienating and Naturalising The most “decisive” (Venuti, 1998b:242) development of translating strategies into and their most direct relevance to the conceptualisation of domesticating and foreignizing should be attributed to the German philosopher, theologian and translator Schleiermacher (1768-1834). In his 1813 influential treatise on translation, he finds the literal-free dichotomy “a different application” (Barbe, 1996:331) and considers there to be only two paths open for the “true” translator (Munday, 2001:27): Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader toward the writer, or he [sic] leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer toward the reader. (Schleiermacher, 1813/1992:41-2) These two paths are what Schleiermacher calls alienating and naturalising. Schleiermacher acknowledges that most translation is naturalising, that is, an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to TL cultural values. This is so simply because of the fact that “a translation should be accessible to those readers who do not know the SL” (Barbe, 1996:332). For him, however, the preference lies in alienating so as to present his translation as an ethnodeviant pressure on the TL values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the ST. To achieve this goal, he maintains, the translator must orient him/herself towards the language and content of the ST by valorising the foreign and transferring it into the TL. 44 Schleiermacher’s distinction has proved highly influential in translation studies and features prominently in contemporary theoretical statements on translation (Kittel and Poltermann, 1998:428). French theorist Berman (1947-1991) “view[s] Schleiermacher’s argument as an ethics of translation, concerned with making the translated text a site where a cultural other is not erased but manifested” (Venuti, 1998b:242). While both German theorist Benjamin (1892-1940) and American translator-and-theorist Venuti see it “as an instrument of cultural innovation” (ibid:242), Venuti “revives” (2000:341) foreignizing translation. Benjamin “favour[s] the principle of alienation” (Kittel and Poltermann, 1998:424), and sees translation as a way of prolonging the “life” of literary works (Benjamin, 1923/2000:16). For him, the task of the translator thus “consists in finding [the] intended effect [Intention] [sic] upon the language into which he [sic] is translating which produces in it the echo of the original” (ibid:20). Since he “is only really concerned with translation that reaches out to the pure language which is potentially present in a select body of writing in any language” (Bush, 1998: 194), he “calls for radical literalism” (Gentzler, 1998:170). Pure language is, in Benjamin’s eyes, a force hidden within certain contexts, a poetic potential, a kernel that is striving to go beyond the immediate shell of words. Therefore, the task that lies before the translator is to reach out and release that potentiality. He is thus adamant that the translator “must go back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate to the point where work, image, and tone converge”, so as to “expand and deepen his [sic] language by means of the foreign language” (Benjamin, 1923/2000:22). 2.1.2.2 Foreignizing and Domesticating 45 Venuti, on the other hand, not only “revives” the traditional distinction between literal and free translation (Bennett, 1999:127), but also “supersede[s]” the dichotomy by “the conjuncture of terms foreignizing and domesticating” (Barbe, 1996:333), with the former later replaced with minoritising. The term domesticating comes with a negative connotation in Venuti. It describes the translation strategy whereby a fluent, transparent style is adopted so as to minimise the foreignness of the ST for TL readers. Such a strategy, which results in the translator’s “invisibility”, thus involves such steps as the careful selection of STs “which lend themselves to such a strategy (Venuti, 1998b:241), the conscious adoption of a fluent, natural-sounding TL style, the adaptation of TT to conform to target discourse types, the interpolation of explanatory material, the removal of SL realia and the general harmonization of TT with TL preconceptions and preferences (Shuttleworth and Cowie, 1997:44). In contrast, a foreignizing strategy designates a type of translation which is produced with a deliberate purpose to break target conventions by retaining the foreignness of the ST. Since Venuti “bemoans” the phenomenon of domesticating in Anglo-American cultures (Munday, 2001:147), he makes a “call to action” (Venuti, 1995:307) for translators to subscribe to foreignizing so as to empower translation “to make a difference, not only at home, in the emergence of new cultural forms, but also abroad, in the emergence of new cultural relations” (ibid:313). For Venuti, such a strategy entails not only a freedom from absolute obedience to target linguistic and textual constraints. It also involves selecting non-fluent, opaque style and including SL realia and TL archaisms, so as to provide the TL reader “an alien reading experience” (ibid). In his later work, Venuti (1998a:11) adopts minoritizing as a synonym for foreignizing. 46 Minotitizing, according to Bennett (1996:128), comes from the notion of the “remainder”, “a flexible concept drawn from Lecercle (1990), which denotes forms and ideas lying outside dominant aspects of language and culture, and beyond the orthodox domain of linguistics”. Venuti (1998a:11) is adamant that, Good translation is minoritizing: it releases the remainder by cultivating a heterogeneous discourse, opening up the standard dialect and literary canons to what is foreign to themselves, to the substandard and the marginal. While Venuti (1995:20) sees this approach as being “highly desirable” “to restrain the ethnocentric violence of translation”, i.e. the “violently” domesticating cultural values of the English-language world, critics of him claim to “find many problems” with his conceptions of foreignizing and domesticating (Barbe, 1996:333). Most obviously, Venuti’s dichotomy, especially his insistence on foreignizing translation to “resist” (Venuti, 1995:17) the domesticating translation that currently dominates Anglo-American literary culture, is envisaged with a political agenda (Baker, 1996:9; 1998c:164; Bennett, 1999:130-131). In this respect, Venuti not only “makes no attempt to camouflage his own preference” (Rajagopalan, 1998:364), but admits: I prefer to translate foreign texts that possess minority status in their cultures, a marginal position in their native canons – or that, in translation, can be useful in minotirising the standard dialect and dominant cultural forms in American English. This preference stems partly from a political agenda that is broadly domestic: an apposition to the global hegemony of English. (Venuti, 1998:10) Another major attack at Venuti lies in the exaggerated role “played by translation in the centring or standardising of languages” (Pym, 1996:174). In this respect, Bennett (1999:132) shows his “disappoint[ment] at Venuti’s failure to provide “a strong case for the role of foreignizing translation…in disturbing the reader, and in a positive way”. While Hatim (1999:219) suspects whether foreignizing “immeasurably” will “increase an 47 already heavy burden on target reader struggling to come to grips with an alien culture through translation”, Rajagopalan (1998:363) feels certain that “the diametrically opposed alternative of presenting the foreign work ‘as in itself really is’ is self-defeating”! This sentiment is shared by Pym (1996:167) who declares that “translation resistance has not brought more democracy, has not changed domestic values, and has been banished to the fringes”! Seen in this perspective, Barbe (1996:334) asserts that foreignizing appears to constitute nothing more than “an intellectual illusion”. 2.1.3 Translation Strategies: Conclusion The foregoing survey of various strategies which have been proposed and/or practiced since times of antiquity enables us to come to a couple of tentative remarks which might be used to substantiate our research questions. First, theoretically, the range of both Venuti’s and other theorists’ concern is “narrow and intense” (Robinson, 1997:97). In fact, despite their terminological variations, these strategies (and their controversies for that matter) seem to boil down to a core binary dichotomy, with the time-honoured literal translation on one pole, and its friend-and-foe free translation on the other. As far as Venuti’s dichotomy is concerned, [h]e only has the one issue, really, this opposition between domestication or fluency and the normative disappearance of the translator that it requires, and foreignism as a channel of dissidence or resistance to hegemonic norms. (Robinson, 1997:97) This typical dualization of translation strategies thus implies only two opposing types of resultant productions, i.e., free or domesticating translation as contrasted to literal or foreignizing translation. To this, one cannot but ask, are translations contrasted to one 48 another exclusively in a black-and-white manner, without any variation or continuum along the opposites? Second, while Venuti “manages to find […] endless variety in the historical and ideological exfoliation of that opposition” (Robinson, 1997:97), he remains a vigorous attacker of domestication and a wheeler-dealing advocate of foreignizing in the years he has been arguing it, as he explicitly professes: Foreignizing translation is a dissident practice, maintaining a refusal of the dominant by developing affiliations with marginal linguistic and literary values at home, including foreign cultures that have been excluded because of their own resistance to dominant values. (Venuti, 1995:148, emphasis added) Venuti’s renouncement of domesticating and his “call” for foreignization seem to leave translators no choice whatsoever in the process of translation. Here, one cannot help wondering if a singled-minded pursuit of the preservation of the ST form would necessitate a production at the sacrifice of meaning. If this concern is justified, it would result in the unfortunate consequence whereby Venuti’s advocacy of foreignism “rather uneasily” allies him with cultural elitism, a means of regulating or even completely blocking popular access to various sacred and classical texts (Robinson, 1997:98). Here lies a dilemma for Venuti: how to distance himself from the aristocratic or hautebourgeois elitism of foreignizing through the ages and transform his preferred method into a form of grass-roots dissidence, the oppositional translator’s resistance to assimilative capitalist culture. Thirdly, Venuti fails to expound how and to what extent foreignizing strategies could be effectively applied in translation practice. What he does recommend in passing to “contemporary translators of literary texts” includes merely “introduce[ing] discursive 49 variations” and “experimenting with archaism, slang, literary allusion and convention” so as “to call attention to the secondary status of the translation and signal the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text” (Venuti, 1995:310-11). Obviously, Venuti is here equating, one the one hand, a fluent translation with a domesticated translation – one which is aimed to “bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar” (ibid:18) – and, on the other hand, a non-fluent translation with a foreignized translation, one which is designed to “signify the difference of the foreign text” (ibid:20). Consequently, a translator would be misled to equate Venuti’s deviating or marginal discourse with foreignizing whereby the cultural other is lies. This would probably lead to the (mis-)conception that foreignizing can in no way render a translation fluent. 2.2 STUDIES OF ENGLISH HLM Notwithstanding the fact that the Chinese classic HLM has been transformed into fifty-three versions (Zhu, 1997:303) in eighteen languages, in part or in whole, studies of these translations are disappointingly few and far between (Hong, 1997:284). In respect of the English translations, only about twenty studies have been done as listed in Table 1.1 in Chapter 1 above. Piteously, even these studies are mostly concerned with Yangs and Hawkes’s versions, and concluded with compliments rather than critiques. However, out of these few, Lin (1976), Hong (1996, 1997, 1998, 2001), Liu and Gu (1997), and He (2001) are worth examining due to their discussions with regard to how the translators deal with cultural phenomena involved in the novel, that is, what strategies are presumably applied. 2.2.1 Lin’ s Studies 50 Taiwanese scholar Lin (1976) (also known as Stephen Soong), deserves our attention because he is the first researcher who makes the most comprehensive studies of Hawkes’s translation (Volume 1 only, though). Shortly after Hawkes’s first volume came into being in 1973, Lin made a series of studies of this work with a view to see how the translator succeeds in introducing the Chinese classic to the western readership with both linguistic and cultural appeal. His studies are diversified, ranging from general comments, to examinations of the renderings of specific aspects of difficulty or significance, including the colours of 红 “red” and 绿 “green”, puns, 冷笑 “cold/forced smiles”, some terms of address, tone or manner of speaking, cases of inadequate translation, etc. Of these aspects, his discussions of Hawkes’s treatment of some Chinese kinship terms are of the most relevance to this study. Specifically, Lin focuses on Baoyu’s addressing to the girls around him, mistresses and maids alike, with 姐姐 “elder sister” and 妹妹 “younger sister”. 林以亮 views this phenomenon as pertaining uniquely to the Chinese culture, representing the familial nature of some Chinese kinship terms, a phenomenon which comes to be called “the extended or generalised usage” of kinship terms by Gu (1990) and the Chinese 一家亲主义 “kinsfolkism” in addressing people by Kong (1999). This phenomenon, Lin (1976:44-5) points out, would post “a daunting problem” to the translator in that a direct rendering of the addresses as such would make the reader “nauseating” since the terms brother and sister “can only be applied to siblings of the same parents in English”. Therefore, to render such terms in a way which “conforms to the English address conventions on the one hand, and retains the sense of affability and geniality between the characters concerned on the other hand”, constitutes a touchstone for a translator’s expertise (ibid:45). 51 Starting from a cultural perspective, Lin takes into consideration contextual factors such as the context of situation in which the terms 姐姐 and 妹妹 occur, and the social relationships between Baoyu and his addressees to whom the terms are used. For instance, Lin (1976:45-47) shows us, (1) when Baoyu and Daiyu are accompanied with their maids or their seniors, he would address her more formally as 林妹妹 or “Younger sister Lin”. (2) However, when they are alone, he would call her intimately as 好妹妹 or “Good younger sister”, (3) an address he would also apply to both Xifeng, and his primary maid Xiren or Aroma as Hawkes renders it, when he has to crave their favour or forgiveness. These situational variations get expression in Hawkes (1) by “Cousin Lin” to imply the formality of Baoyu’s tone, (2) by “cuzzy, dear”, “Dai, dear”, “coz”, etc., to indicate Baoyu’s affection while avoiding repetition at same time, and (3) by “dearest/darling Feng” (to Xifeng) and “Dearest/Sweetest Aroma” (to Xiren), to show Baoyu’s complaisance. Based upon these and other analyses, Lin (ibid:46-47) claims that Hawkes’s solutions are not only contextually appropriate for the dyads concerned, but also succeed in averting a monotonus tone arising from repetitive and unnatural addresses. He (ibid:7) even concludes that Hawkes’s translation “reads so smooth and enjoyable that it simply does not look like a translation”, an effect which conforms to what Venuti (1995:1) sees as being typically characteristic of a domestication but which appeals to the author of the present paper as a leaner of English. In fact, Lin (1976:128) likens the translation to 化境 or “a transmigration of soul”, a term conceived by Lin Xu (1852-1924) – one of the most important forerunners in China’s modern literary translation – to describe a translation that reads fluent in the TL but retains the original “flavour” of the ST (Lin, 1976:128). It thus comes as no wonder that Lin (ibid:1) asserts that “with a bosom friend like Hawkes, the novel HLM will surely spread to every corner of the 52 English-speaking world.” While this is well-nigh to say that Hawkes’s work has achieved an equivalent effect, Lin stops short of applying any label to it. 2.2.2 Hong’s Studies Hong Kong-based researcher Hong (1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001) is interested in finding out how Hawkes and Yangs help their respective readers to comprehend the cultural phenomena involved in their translations. Focusing on the use of domesticating skills in rendering personal names (1996), customs and idiomatic expressions (1997, 1998 and 2001), he makes a series of comparative studies of the two versions. If it is true that Lin’s studies point to the claim that Hawkes domesticates his translation by adapting the ST to the typical English way of story-telling in order to meet the expectations of his reader, it is also true that Hong’s studies reinforce this claim by supplying more examples centring on cultural contents. While Hong does not apply any systematic method in his studies, some of them are relevant to our study in terms of his discussions of the translators’ orientations and his subsequent labelling the two translations under investigation. One case in point is his (Hong, 1996) comparison of Hawkes and Yangs’ treatment of personal names in the novel. Drawing our attention to the fact that here are 746 characters involved in the story (ibid:287), he points out that the target reader would have no way to enjoy the novel if s/he is beset with the burden of numerous meaningless but confusing names and their relationships (p.288). He thus endorses Hawkes’s “double standard” (p.287) in transliterating the names of both masters of the Jia House and their relatives and friends but translating the names of the servants semantically. Even with this semantic 53 “(re)naming, Hawkes adopts a “one-person-one-name” policy. Unlike Yangs who try to retain the cultural features of Chinese names by rendering the courtesy name (字), pen name (号) and personal name (名) of a character, Hawkes gives only a pinyin rendering of the personal name. This measure, Hong argues, serves the translator’s reader-friendly orientation, since by greatly reducing the reader’s burden of having to come into grips with hundreds of meaningless personal names, it facilitate the reader’s appreciation of the storyline (p.288). Theorising the two translators’ contrast of approaches in this aspect with Newmark’s dichotomy of communicative and semantic translation, Hong (ibid:306) concludes that Hawkes is inclined to a communicative translation while Yangs to a semantic one. 2.2.3 Liu and Gu’s Study The same conclusion is reached by Liu and Gu (1997) who are interested in how the cultural contents of some Chinese expressions get represented in Hawkes and Yangs. Basing on their comparison of the two translators’ renditions of such culturally loaded items as the religious conceptions of 神 仙 (“supernatural being”) and 天 (“sky” or “nature”), Liu and Gu arrive at the above-mentioned conclusion. They argue that, Yangs, by rendering the terms 神仙 as “immortals” and 天 as “Heaven” respectively, are retaining the Taoist nature of the ST. By contrast, Hawkes, who renders the two terms as “salvation” and “God” respectively, is replacing the Taoist colour of the terms in question with that of Christianity (ibid). According to them, “immortals” represents the ultimate ideal Taoist followers pursue, i.e., the ability to have infinite life or not subject to death; “salvation”, in contrast, conveys the “deliverance from the power or penalty of sin” or “redemption” embodied by Christian belief. 54 While their argument in this aspect sounds feasible, their analysis for the two translators’ renditions for 天 sounds plausible. This is because, not only Hawkes’s choice of “God” can be applied to the being conceived as the perfect, omnipotent, omniscient originator and ruler of the universe in both the Jewish and Muslim religions, apart from Christianity (OED online). Even Yangs’ “Heaven” can be taken as embodying both “the abode of God, the angels, and the souls of those who are granted salvation” (OED online) in the narrow sense as Liu and Gu identify associated with Christianity, but also the eternal state of communion with God or everlasting bliss in a broader sense. Another problem with Liu and Gu’s study is that the data the researchers so heavily rely on in support of their conclusion is very limited both in quantity and scope. Beside, given the fact that only two versions are held in contrast, it is imaginable that they tend to find the works in diametrical opposition to each other in terms of translation strategies. 2.2.4 He’s Study The other substantial work that deserves our attention here is He’s (2001) contrastive examination of the five English translations. The theoretical basis on which her study is established constitutes a continuum from Nida’s principle of equivalent effect to Benjamin’s principle of alienation. Using this continuum as a measure to gauge the orientation of translation to which each of the five translators under consideration is inclined, He investigates the various renditions for the customs/festivals, culturally specific factors, names of place, and rhetoric that occur in the first two chapters. Significantly, she offers her impressions of the five versions as a reader and claims that her findings would serve as a reference guide to a prospective reader in deciding on a HLM translation to be picked up in accordance with his/her own needs (p.2). 55 Most prominently, He finds that Joly’s work not only retains and represents as much as possible both the literary style and cultural flavour of the ST (2001:97), but also reads “elegant” just as its original does (p.6). She therefore labels Joly as an alienator who works along Benjamin’s principle of translation. With regard to Hawkes’s production, she observes that it is conspicuously inclined towards Nida’s philosophy of dynamic effect (p.95) since Hawkes strives to give an “explanatory recount” of the ST (p.97). As far as Chi-chen Wang, the McHugh sisters and Yangs are concerned, He thinks that they share the same orientation in their translations; it is only that they do not go as far as Hakwes does (ibid) (see Figure 2.1 below). Based on the above observations, He (p.101-2) concludes that, of the five English versions of HLM, only Joly and Hawkes strike her “as the most impressive” while the others “read insipid or pedestrian”. Figure 2.1: Orientation of the five English translations of HLM 2.2.5 Translations Studies of HLM: Conclusion To wrap up our review of major previous studies of the English translations of HLM, several remarks can be made which serve to necessitate the present study. First of all, none of the studies questions or problematizes the dichotomies they employ. Instead, they just take the dichotomies as granted and use them to label their subject matters in a ready and convenient manner. For instance, Hong, and Liu and Gu inductively categorize Hawkes’s work as a communicative production and Yangs’ as a semantic one, by contrasting their renditions of a couple of cultural terms. 56 Secondly, most of the studies conveniently commit themselves to a study of just two English versions of HLM in contrast. This limitation in scope not only facilitates the researchers’ comparison and judgment, but also restricts them from seeing in perspective the whole range of options offered by other translators circumscribed outside of their attention. This accounts for Lin’s overflow of praise and admiration in his exclusive research of Hawkes’ work, and both Hong, and Liu and Gu’s categorization of Hawkes and Yangs’ versions as in diametrical opposition to each other in terms of translation strategy. However, when the landscape of comparison/contrast expands to take into consideration of all the five versions, as He does, not only the seemingly black-and-white distinction between Hawkes and Yangs’ works collapses, but also Lin’s commendation of Hawkes becomes dubious. These two points in combination thus result in the biased perception that an opposition exists in translation strategy, and that what we need to do is just to find its proper application and distribution. The third problem with the previous studies is that they are not done in a systematic manner. By systematicity two things are meant. The first has to do with the data of the studies. Generally, these studies fail to cover the specific aspects of inquiry throughout the volumes of each translation. Instead, each research simply stops with sporadic examples here and there from different chapters. Even He’s study which ranges several aspects of study and covers two chapters constitutes a modicum of the majority of English chapters. Admittedly, a comparison/contrast of different versions of HLM not only involves a scrutiny of a dozen volumes of the translations. It also requires a crosscheck with the original as well. Given the formidable number of volumes of source and target texts to be examined for such studies, any researcher can be excused for the lack of 57 completeness, the present study being no exception. The second unsystematicity of the studies lies in the lack of a general theoretical framework and research methodology. Except for He’s research, all the other studies fail to supply an adequate framework for comparison and theoretical argumentation. This thus results in the impression that the researchers are merely making claims or labelling the translations for its own sake. The afore-mentioned problems with the previous studies seem to necessitate the present research. It thus goes without saying that this study differs from its predecessors in three aspects. First, instead of adopting any of the dichotomies of translation strategies in an ad hoc or de facto manner, this study intends to problematize the various dichotomies of translation strategies, with an aim to see how they can be best used to determine the nature of a translation. Second, the data used for comparison and contrast comes from the first twelve chapters of the ST and all its six English versions. This is significant in that the chapters represent one tenth of all the data chapters. It is also significant in that the English versions span nearly one century, from the early 1890s to the late 1980s, which means that a comparison of the versions will throw some light on whether or how translation theory evolved during the time when the earliest English HLM came into being to the time when its latest counterpart was published. In addition, the study designs a framework based on Gu (to be reviewed shortly) whereby the cultural values of both the ST address terms in question and their various renditions in the English versions can be captured. 58 2.3 POLITENESS AND TERMS OF ADDRESS Literally, politeness – which has the most approximate Chinese equivalent as limao (礼貌) or “polite appearance” morphemically (Gu, 1990:238) – may be literally defined as “a dextrous management of our words and actions whereby we make other people have better opinion of us and themselves” (OED, 2002). Politeness is a sociocultural phenomenon which can be interpreted, following Lakoff (1990:34), as “a system of interpersonal relations designed to facilitate interaction by minimizing the potential for conflict and confrontation inherent in all human interchange”. With regard to the use of a term as an address and/or reference, it is called and considered polite when it is “adequate for the situation” (Braun, 1988:49). To be exact, if a form of address “is appropriate to the relationship of speaker and addressee, and…is in accord with the rules of the community, or at least those of the dyad, [it] will always be regarded as adequately polite” (ibid). In this sense, the collocutors are both bound by what Braun (ibid:51) calls a “conversational contract”, something which “regulates [their] rights and obligations in the framework of the conversation” (ibid). While “politeness is a feature of language in use” (House, 1998:54), and “all languages are equally polite” in terms of the variety of forms of address and other linguistic means at their disposal (ibid:61), Chinese and English have unique ways to express politeness. What this means is that while politeness behaviour concerns human communicative behaviour in general, it varies from culture to culture, and from language to language. In what follows, theories of politeness will be discussed, first from the perspective of “universals of politeness”, then to that of culture-specific politeness. It is hoped that this review will not only serve to provide some larger theoretical scenario in which studies of politeness in language use can be contextualised. 59 More importantly, it will provide frameworks whereby both the use and translations of Chinese titles and honorifics can be investigated in the forthcoming chapters. 2.3.1 Theories of Politeness General theories of politeness can also be termed as “universal theories of politeness” since their proponents claim universal applicability of their theories to languages across cultural boundaries. Represented by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) and Leech (1983), this approach is concerned with both principles and maxims, and the management of “face”. 2.3.1.1 Brown and Levinson Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) contribute to the theories of politeness by their studies for “the management of face”, i.e., the “face-saving” view of politeness, an “essentially…biological, psychological theory [which] both distinguishes and identifies the language-user as an individual and as a member of a group” (House, 1998:57). Basing on Grice’s maxim theory and Goffman’s concept of “face” (i.e. “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact” (Goffman, 1967:5)), Brown and Levinson look at politeness in English and some ethnic languages in Mexico and southern India. For them, face is “the kernel element in folk notions of politeness” (Brown and Levinson, 1987:62), and therefore to be polite is to be face-saving. 60 However, politeness is only called for when the performance of on-record1 facethreatening acts (FTAs) is to be redressed. According to the direction of redress, politeness falls into two categories: positive and negative. The former is “redress for an FTA directed to the addressee’s positive face, his perennial desire that he wants…should be thought of as desirable” (Brown and Levinson, 1987:101). The latter, in contrast, is “redressive action directed to the addressee’s negative face: his want to have his freedom of action unhindered and his attention unimpeded” (ibid:129). Significantly, Brown and Levinson assert that, since nearly every speech act constitutes in a specific way a threat to the positive or negative face of either of the two interactants, certain linguistic strategies must be chosen from an elaborate repertoire of positive and negative politeness in order to provide redressive action. The choice of strategies depends on the speaker’s judging the size of FTA, which is assessed on the basis of the dimensions of Power, Distance and Imposition. It follows that negative politeness strategies are associated “not only with the need to mitigate speech acts which threaten negative face but also with expressions which establish and/or maintain social distance and formality” (Harris, 2003:33). Cases in point include the use of certain modes of address (e.g., titles and role assignations as cultural universals) and special linguistic expressions (e.g., honorifics in Chinese and Japanese) which structure and frame encounters, conventionalised openings and closings, etc. 1 Apart from positive politeness and negative politeness, Brown and Levinson (1987) also coin the terms of on record and off record to discuss and classify politeness strategies. On record describes a speech act in which the addressee can take the motive of the speaker and the information conveyed, which in this case the speaker really intends to convey, literally. Off record describes a speech act where one wants to ask the addressee to do something or to criticize the addressee, and so on, but one speaks in a roundabout or ambiguous way, so that the addressee has to see behind the words to determine the true motive of the speaker and what meaning the speaker really intends to convey. Brown and Levinson further divide on record into bald on record, i.e., on record without redressive action for the FTA, and politeness strategies on record, i.e., on record with redressive action for the FTA. 61 2.3.1.2 Leech Leech (1983) is concerned with how politeness provides a missing link between the Gricean Cooperative Principle (CP) and the problem of how to relate sense to force (Leech, 1983:104). Taking into consideration the context in which politeness occurs, Leech distinguishes politeness into relative and absolute. For him, relative politeness highlights the fact that politeness is often relative to some norm of behaviour which is for a particular setting regarded as typical (e.g., “the Chinese and Japanese are very polite in comparison with Europeans”) (ibid:84). Absolute politeness, on the other hand, is seen as a scale or a set of scales with a negative and a positive pole, which are measured in terms of values on the scales of cost-benefit, optionality, indirectness, authority, and social distance (ibid:123). At the negative pole is negative politeness consisting of minimising the impoliteness of impolite illocutions, whereas at the positive pole is positive politeness consisting of maximising the politeness of illocutions (ibid:83-84). Leech focuses on absolute politeness and deals with the normative (or regulative, to use his favourite term) aspect of politeness. He formulates the Politeness Principle and six maxims, including Tact, Generosity, Approbation, Modesty, Agreement, and Sympathy (ibid:132), and claims that his formulations are universal. 2.3.1.3 Cross-cultural Studies of Politeness Cross-cultural studies of politeness in different languages have raised doubts about the applicability of the above-discussed universal principles and maxims of politeness. With regard to Brown and Levinson’s general theory of politeness, Harris finds that their stated aim of wishing “in the first place, to account for the pan-cultural 62 interpretability of politeness, broadly defined” (Brown and Levinson, 1987:283) “marks their emphasis on and foregrounding of culture explicitly” and thus “anticipates the critique of western ethnocentrism which has followed” (Harris, 2003:29). As far as their face-saving strategies are concerned, House (1998:57) points out that they fail to provide any indication as to how speakers are to assess the values of the dimensions of Power, Distance and Imposition in any individual act, so as to choose certain linguistic strategies from an elaborate repertoire of positive and negative politeness appropriate to the communicative situation. She adds that even their dimensions of Power, Distance and Imposition are abstract and fluid in nature. Harris (2003), on the other hand, takes Brown and Levinson to task on account of both the empirical nature of their data, and their failure “to deal to any meaningful extent with different discourse types” (ibid:28). As far as their notion of face is concerned, House (1998:57) perceives it as “derived from an Anglophone individualistic notion of face closely linked to status and implying competition and prestige”. Watts et al (1992:9-10), by relating to the English language’s revealing metaphor “to put on a face”, remind us that in a less competitive and individualistic group, status or prestige may either be less important or be assigned to a person through the status s/he occupies in the group. Yu (1999:283) echoes the same concern and argues that their face is “an individualistic, self-oriented image” so much so that “to protect and enhance one’s face is to act mainly in compliance with the anticipated expectation of personal desires, which are seen as rational assumptions that all members in the society are presumed to abide by”. By contrast, the Chinese face “is a communal, interpersonal image that not only depends on but is determined by the participation of others” (ibid). Therefore, in a Chinese society, politeness becomes a phenomenon 63 pertaining to the level of society “which endorses its normative constraints on each individual” (Gu, 1990:242). As far as translation is concerned, House (1998:58) asserts that Brown and Levinson’s view of politeness cannot be “easily or usefully applied to translation” since “the interaction between the human beings involved (author, readers, translator) is hidden and indirect such that psychosocial inferential processes are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to assess”. With regard to Leech’s politeness maxims, critics point out that Leech’s conceptualisation of politeness “seems difficult to apply to concrete instances of discourse” (House, 1998:57), and that there seems to be no restriction to the number of maxims to be produced to explain newly perceived regularity in language use. Gu (1990:243-244) challenges the universality of Leech’s Politeness Principle, arguing that it fails to capture some of the politeness phenomena observed by Chinese speakers, for instance, Self-denigration and Other-elevation in communication. Chen (1993:62-3) also finds that American Chinese and English speakers differ in their response to compliments: where Chinese speakers focus on the Modesty Maxim, English speakers on Agreement. Chen attributes this difference to their difference in social values. And this might justify House’s (1998:56) observation of the non-applicability of Leech’s approach in translation practice. And this is where Gu’s culture-specific maxims of Chinese politeness comes into play. 2.3.1.4 Gu’s Maxims of Chinese Politeness Unsatisfied with the universalistic views of politeness, especially Brown and Levinson’s conceptualisation of face and Leech’s maxims in capturing politeness in the 64 Chinese language, Gu studies Chinese politeness from both social and pragmatic perspectives. He approaches the modern Chinese concept limao or politeness from the classical notion of li (礼), the social hierarchy and order of the slavery system of the Zhou Dynasty (dating back to 1100 BC) as formulated by Confucius (551–479 BC). He (1990:239) observes that where li originally served to signal social hierarchical relations and did not mean politeness in its modern sense, it has now “assumed two new duties, viz. to enhance social harmony and to defuse interpersonal tension or conflict”. However, what seem to have remained intact are the essential elements or manifestation of Chinese politeness, which can be substantiated by the basic notions underlying the Chinese conception of limao, i.e., respectfulness, modesty, attitudinal warmth, and refinement. Aaccording to Gu (ibid), respectfulness means Self’s positive appreciation or admiration of Other concerning the latter’s face, social status, and so on. Modesty “can be seen as another way of saying ‘self-denigration’” (ibid). While attitudinal warmth refers to Self’s demonstration of kindness, consideration, and hospitality to Other, refinement concerns Self’s behaviour which meets certain standards. By highlighting the four basic notions, Gu (ibid) argues that “the essential elements of politeness or what counts as politeness behaviour” in li “have remained intact”. Significantly, by pinpointing the fundamental difference between the western concept of politeness and the Chinese notion of limao, he points out that in the Chinese context, the concept has become “moralised” to some extent (ibid:243) and “exercises its normative function in constraining individual speech acts as well as the sequence of talk exchange” (ibid:242). In contrast, politeness in western cultures is merely treated as instrumental norms and values for interaction between “two rational and face-caring model persons” (ibid:242). 65 In an attempt to capture the four notions underlying the Chinese conception of limao, Gu formulates four Politeness Maxims: Self-denigration (贬己尊人准则), Address (称呼准则), Tact (文雅准则) and Generosity (求同准则). Of these maxims, Self-denigration and Address are of the most direct relevance to the present study and will be furthered discussed in 2.3.2.2.3 below. Generally speaking, the Address Maxim functions as the general guiding principle of the Chinese politeness, with the other three serving as its complements under specific communicative circumstances. Here, Gu’s definition of the maxims is given in passing. The Address Maxim reads that “address your interlocutor with an appropriate address term” (ibid:248). The Self-denigration Maxim requires the speaker to (a) denigrate Self and (b) elevate Other at the same time. As for the Maxims of Generosity and Tact, Gu (ibid:252) acknowledges that they are a modified version of Leech’s maxims of the same names, i.e., “Bilaterality [between impositives and commissives] means that in practice, there is little need to distinguish the ‘other-centred’ Maxim of Tact from the ‘self-centred Maxim of Generosity” (Leech, 1983:133). However, Gu (1990:252) sees the two maxims as being “complementary” to each other in Chinese culture “because impositives and commissives are translational in view of the cost-benefit scale, S[peaker]’s impositives will be H[earer]’s commissives, and S’s commissives H’s impositives”, and vice versa (ibid). 2.3.2 Studies of Address Terms The above survey of politeness theories indicates that politeness as a sociocultural phenomenon is intimately connected with the realisation of speech styles and formality, which is in turn symptomatically associated with norms or choices. It also indicates that 66 such realisations of norms/choices are conveniently associated with the use of address terms in interactions. This is not merely because forms of address as part and parcel of speech seem to “constitute a nearly universal language of relationship” (Brown and Ford, 1961:375), but mainly due to the fact that they are the most conveniently identifiable indices to the linguistic politeness of a culture or community. In the following section, studies of address terms will be reviewed with special reference to their usage in English and Chinese. As with the foregoing review of theories of politeness, these studies will be approached first from a universal perspective and then from a cross-cultural perspective. 2.3.2.1 Universal Perspective of Address Terms The universal perspective of address practice owes its originality to Brown and Gilman’s (1960) seminal research on the semantics of pronouns of address in some European languages, including French, Italian, German, etc., besides English. Concerned with the co-variation between the pronouns used and the objective relationship existing between speaker and addressee, they set out to investigate the connection between the dimensions of power and solidarity, and the use of pronouns in speech. Adopting the symbols of T and V (from the Latin tu and vos) “as generic designators for a familiar and a polite pronoun in any language” (Brown and Gilman, 1960:254), they find that where the solidarity semantics necessitates symmetrical or reciprocal T and V, the power semantics entails nonreciprocal pronouns, i.e., “the superior says T and receives V” (ibid:255). Since the way in which one person addresses another and is in turn addressed by his/her dyad constitutes a social event of great regularity, Brown (1965) later expresses this regularity in what he terms Invariant Norm of Address, i.e., the linguistic form used to an inferior in dyads of unequal status is used in dyads of equal status among 67 intimates, and the linguistic form used to a superior in dyads of unequal status is used in dyads of equal status among strangers. This universal stance has been confirmed by subsequent studies on disparate languages. For instance, Brown and Ford’s (1961) research on forms of address in American English using as corpora American plays, observed usage in a Boston business firm, and reported usage of business executives, finds primarily FN (first name) reciprocation, or TLN (title plus last name) reciprocation, with asymmetrical exchanges where age or occupational rank differences are conspicuous. Seen from a wider perspective, this universal stance seems to go hand in hand with the Brown and Levinson’s conceptualisations of positive and negative politeness with reference to making decisions about what forms of address to be used. Positive politeness is here characterised by use of FN rather then TLN. It is solidarity oriented, “emphasises shared attitudes and values” and “minimises status difference” (Holmes, 1992:297). By contrast, negative politeness “involves expressing oneself appropriately in terms of social distance and respecting status differences”, i.e., by use of TLN (ibid). 2.3.2.2 Cross-cultural Studies of Address Terms However, the universal stance concerning naming and addressing does not seem to apply to all cultures and communicative situations. Even in English where asymmetrical TLN is expected, one would be at a loss as to whether a certain Smith Jones should be addressed as Mr Jones, Dr Jones, Sir, or Doc, etc. This is not merely due to the fact that all kinds of combinations are possible. Importantly, it is attributed to the fact that the “short, crisp, abstract” sociolinguistic features such as power, solidarity, intimacy, familiarity, distance, deference, and the like, “are arbitrary” and fail to portrait in accurate terms the “different kinds and different degrees of what might be called ‘distance’ and 68 ‘familiarity’ (Wierzbicka, 1992:310-1). Wardhaugh (1998:264) seems right when he warns us of “some of the possible dangers in cross-cultural communication when different relationships are expressed through what appears, superficially at least, to be the same address system”. The same is true of Jakobson’s (1960:278) reminder of the “danger of reinterpreting the data of one language from the point of view of another pattern”. The rest of the review will focus on culture-specific studies of address terms. 2.3.2.2.1 Wierzbicka’s Semantics of Titles Wierzbicka (1992:314) refutes both the illusion that the sociolinguistic labels such as “distance”, “respect” have constant meaning within a given language, and the universalistic illusion “that they can be transferred, with a constant value, across language boundaries”. To support her thesis, she looks into the semantics of titles and other forms of address in English, French, Russian, Japanese, to name only a few, with a view to define and explicate the semantic components of the address forms in these languages. Since this study is concerned with the English renditions of Chinese titles and honorifics used in HLM, our focus here is exclusively on her findings with regard to English titles. Of the various English titles, Wierzbicka pays attention to Mr, Mrs, Miss, Sir, Father, and Professor. Using the following utterances as examples, 1. Good-bye, Mr. Brown. 2. Good-bye, Andrew. 3. Good-bye, Sir. 4. Good-bye, Father. Wierzbicka (1992:309-11) points out that while the “convenient mnemonic labels” “distance” and “familiarity” could serve to distinguish utterance (2) from the other three 69 as being “more familiar”, they can hardly spell out the “imperceptible” meaning shifts between the “distance” implied by the three. Therefore, verbal explications of the semantics of the titles are indispensable to accurate portrayal of the different kinds and degrees of what might be called “distance”, “familiarity” and “respect” (ibid:311). Therefore, the semantics of an address, say Mr Brown, can be explicated as: Mr Brown [DISTANCE] (a) I want to speak to you the way people speak to men whom they don’t know well and the way people don’t speak to men whom they don’t know or whom they know well, or to children [RESPECT] (b) I want to show that something good toward you of the kind that people show they feel toward people whom they don’t know well (Wiezbicka, 1992:309-10) And the subtle differences in semantics between Mr Brown, and Professor Brown and Sir can be respectively encapsulated in the following explications: Professor Brown [DISTANCE] (a) I want to speak to you the way people speak to people whom they don’t know well and who can be called ‘Professor’ and the way people don’t speak to people whom they don’t know or whom they know well [RESPECT] (b) I want to show that something good toward you of the kind that people show they feel toward people whom they don’t know well and who can be called ‘Professor’ (Wiezbicka, 1992:312) Sir [DISTANCE] (a) I want to speak to you the way people speak to men whom they don’t know or whom they don’t know well and the way people don’t speak to men whom they know well [RESPECT] (b) I want to show that something good toward you of the kind that people show they feel toward people whom they don’t know well [DEFERENCE] (c) I want to show that I think of you as someone to whom I couldn’t say ‘I don’t want to do what you want me to do’ (Wiezbicka, 1992:310) 70 Based on these verbal explications, Wierzbicka summarises the essential difference between the English titles of Mr, Mrs, Miss, and Ms on the one hand, and Professor (and Doctor as an extension) on the other. She (1992:312) concludes that the former “all convey a kind of respect accorded to all people on the basis of their social status as adults and as individuals” with “their individuality being symbolised by their surname”. The respect embodied in the later, however, is “based not on adulthood and individuality but on professional status” (ibid). She (ibid:312-3) further dwells on the delicate differences between titles in the former group, pointing out that, “although they could be easily described in terms of abstract features such as ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘unmarried’ and ‘± married’”, such description “would not be fully adequate and would imply false symmetries”. An obvious reason is held responsible for this: where Mr does not refer to marriage at all, Mrs becomes the “marked” title for women, and even Ms refers to marriage, “albeit in a consciously negative way” (ibid:313). The most advantageous point of Wierzbicka’s approach lies in its ability to encapsulate the semantic differences between the English titles. Another merit of Wierzbicka’s study is the insight it throws on cross-cultural studies and translation practice. By highlighting the differences in meaning between titles in the same category within a language, Wierzbicka disillusions the position that the meanings of “distance”, “respect” or “familiarity” contained in the titles are constant. Instead, she reminds us that the value of a given form of address is relative, “depend[ing] on with what other forms this form competes” (ibid:229). This reminder thus has the consequent analogy that the value of an address term in language A cannot be transferred to language B with the same constant value. 71 2.3.2.2.2 Sun’s Study of Address Terms in HLM Since HLM primarily records the life of a rich family and the complicated human relations between its members and their many servants, associates and relatives, terms of address as markers of both interpersonal relations and indicators of the part and parcel of appropriate social behaviour of the time unavoidably play an important role in registering (and maintaining, at least superficially) the social structure within that context. Sun (1991:201-06) outlines (see Table 2.1 below) four principles governing the use of address terms by members, relatives and servants of the Jia House in HLM. The first is the Principle of Patriarchal Clan, which concerns the correct use of kinship terms to address and refer to family members and relatives on private occasions. Basically, members of a family and, as an extension, all members of the whole clan, are ranked in terms of their patriarchal generation, age and sex, and address and/or be addressed (as well as refer and/or be referred to) with regard to ego’s own rank in the family and clan. As a general principle of the traditional patriarchal system, this maxim guarantees the supreme sovereignty of the father (and the eldest son in the absence of a father) in the family. It reflects the effect of the three cardinal guides of ethics (“subject follows lord, son father, and wife husband”) in feudal Chinese societies. The principle is characterised by its non-reciprocity: while younger or junior members of the family (and of the clan as well) are obliged to address and refer to their seniors with correct kinship terms, the seniors are free from using reciprocal kinship terms. Instead, they can choose to address and speak about their juniors with full or first names, or even no terms of address altogether. 72 Table 2.1: Sun’s principles of addresses used in HLM Principle Situation of Use Dyads Factors Characteristics Public/official Social (un)equals Position, gender, marital status, age/seniority Non-reciprocal Patriarchal Clan Private Family members and relatives Generation, gender, marital status, age/seniority Non-reciprocal Politeness Private Friends/Social equals Age, gender, marital status Reciprocal Emotion Private Intimates/foes Gender (Non-)reciprocal Social Stratification The second is the Principle of Social Stratification. This dimension involves the use of appropriate titles to address and/or refer to people. The principle stipulates that a social subject should unconditionally prostrate himself to his superior on all matters. Embodied in the way how people are addressed and talked about socially, the principle requires that in public or official encounters, a person who enjoys superior social status be addressed/referred to with the title he holds, even if the dyads are family members or relatives. The principle guarantees the social hierarchy of feudal societies and constitutes the core of the three cardinal guides. It also gives rise to non-reciprocity between the dyads with regard to terms of address used. In fact, the senior can always use the name (full or given) or the pronominal address 你 “you” to address a hearer or refer to a person junior to the speaker in social status, but the reverse is proscribed. Next is the Principle of Politeness. According to Sun (1991:204), this principle consists of the use of self-deprecatory and other-elevating terms, which shares the concept honorifics. As will be seen shortly, the principle corresponds to Gu’s (1990) Selfdenigration Maxim. Since linguistic politeness consists of, among other things, all uses of 73 correct address terms, Sun’s terminology overlaps with the general phenomenon of politeness. Therefore, in order to avoid conceptual confusion, it seems more appropriate to replace Sun’s terminology with that of Gu’s. However, it should be noted that in HLM, as in other oral and written communication, the principle of self-depreciation constitutes a supplement of the principles of patriarchal clan and social stratification. It thus works in conjunction with the other two principles. Apart from the use of titles and kinship terms to speak to/of the collocutor and people and things on his/her side, the application of selfdeprecatory and other-elevating honorifics used to be the norm rather than exception. Mention has also to be made that, unlike the principles of patriarchal clan and social stratification, the Maxim of Self-denigration requires reciprocity between dyads. The final principle Sun (1991:205) identifies is the Principle of Emotion. According to him, this principle refers to a speaker’s choice of address terms that is motivated by his/her emotional pulse, regardless of the general principles of politeness. This phenomenon conforms to the category of address terms called endearing/cursing terms in politeness and address studies. Sun (ibid) points out that while characters in HLM generally observe the principles of clan, affinity and status differentiation in ways that are deemed appropriate, there are occasions when speakers violate these rules by using words and expressions to show their emotions only. But these occasions, Sun admits, are mostly informal. To this we shall add another observation: these violations are primarily restricted to people who enjoy higher social status. The most conspicuous instances of emotional addresses can be found in Jia Zheng’s cursing of his son Baoyu, and Baoyu’s conspicuous expectation of favour and intimacy from his girls. 74 With regard to the relation between the four principles, Sun (1991:206) points out that none of them can be used in isolation; instead, they are inter-related and interrestrictive. Basically, they operate in the following mechanism and precedence (symbolized by > ): Social Stratification > Patriarchal Clan > Self-Denigration > Emotion Sun’s study classifies Chinese terms of addresses that are used in HLM and summarises the principles that govern the operation of different categories of forms of address in concrete terms. For this reason, Sun’s principles will be used in combination with Gu’s Address and Self-denigration Maxims for data analysis in this study. 2.3.2.2.3 Gu’s Maxims of Address and Self-denigration Related to Sun’s principles are Gu’s (1990) Address Maxim and Self-denigration Maxim. The former, according to Gu, requires the speaker to “address [his/her] interlocutor with an appropriate address term” (Gu’s, 1990:248), and is designed to capture the use of Chinese address forms which he sees as covering the vocative use of governmental titles, occupational titles, proper names, kinship terms and what can be called “address politeness markers” (i.e. honorific and solidarity boosters) (ibid:249). Gu (Gu, 1992:12) contributes by attempting to spell out the pragmatic factors which determine the choice of specific address terms in different situations, including (1) kin/non-kin, (2) social position, (3) professional position, (4) familiarity, (5) colleague, (6) gender, (7) age, (8) mode (of interaction) (formal vs informal), and (9) occasion (of 75 interaction) (in public vs at home). For a schematic presentation, Gu’s maxim is projected in Figure 2.2 below. Figure 2.2: The Chinese address system (adapted from Gu, 1992:12) Gu’s (1990:246) Self-denigration Maxim corresponds to Sun’s Principle of Politeness and governs the use of Self-depreciatory and Other-elevating honorifics in communication. Specifically, it consists of two clauses or submaxims: (a) denigrate Self and (b) elevate Other in interactions. Gu (ibid:243) points out that, like the general Chinese conception of politeness, this maxim is “to some extent moralised” and constrains the use of language in people’s interactions. As a result, a breach of submaxim (a) is perceived as being impolite or rude, whereas a breach of submaxim (b) is construed as being arrogant, boasting, or self-conceived (ibid:246). Besides, the Chinese concepts of Self and Other, Gu observes, have wide extensions beyond the addresser and addressee per se. They involve Self and Other’s physical conditions, 76 mental states, properties, values, attitudes, writing, spouse, family, relatives, etc., so much so that “some acts such as visiting, reading, etc., performed and referred to by Self” become subject to the regulation of the maxim (ibid:247). This seems to justify Brown’s (1996:46) assertion that, as “the basic principle of Asian politeness”, “it is necessary to have always in mind, the extended self, the self and its close connections, distinguished from others and the connections of others.” Gu’s Address and Self-denigration maxims attempt to encapsulate in a fairly accurate manner Chinese politeness with reference to the factors and situational variables governing the choice of corresponding titles and honorifics. Besides, different from Brown and Levinson’s “instrumental” (Gu, 1990:242) and “Anglophone individualistic” (House, 1998:57) notion of face and politeness – which sees negative face as closely linked with interactants’ wants, and the employment of politeness strategies for the purpose of counteracting so-called face-threatening acts – Gu’s maxims focus on the “normative” function of Chinese address behaviour in constraining individual speech acts as well as the sequence of talk exchange (Gu, 1990:242). For instance, his Selfdenigration Maxim shows that, [I]t is not something intrinsic in self and other’s surname, profession, writing, belongings, etc. that is politeness-sensitive. Rather it is the acts of ‘self-referring’ and ‘other-referring’, i.e. acts of handling those attributes, that are politeness-sensitive, hence being regulated by the Selfdenigration Maxim. (Gu, 1990:247) That is to say, the Chinese conception of politeness has, to some extent, been “moralized”, so much so that it reflects the personal accomplishment in address behaviour, and that a failure to observe politeness will incur social sanctions (ibid: 242). 77 However, Gu’s Address and Self-denigration Maxims come with some fatal problems. First, there is an obvious confusion in Gu’s identification of the factors governing the choice of appropriate terms of address. For instance, whereas the factors of social and professional position are one and the same thing in essence, the factors of familiarity, mode and occasion seem inexplicable to one’s satisfaction – in fact the three are all concerned with the degree of formality of interactions. Besides, colleague stands out as an independent factor when it should pertain to the general category of non-kin. If colleague really deserves a special status, it should be contrasted with friend rather than yes-no as opposites. This is because this seeming factor plays a paramount role in the choice of Chinese address terms, especially of the reciprocal honorifics. This confusion thus results in the disability to decide what is or is not a factor contributing to the choice of address terms appropriate for an interaction. Second, his maxims leave one important pragmatic factor out of consideration when determining or identifying the factors affecting a choice. This is the “marital status” of the addressee in question. In Chinese, this factor is crucial for the choice of a great majority of forms of address, except for the few unisex professional titles in modern Chinese such as 医生 (doctor), 教授 (professor), and as 书记 (party secretary). As far as our data is concerned, almost all titles and most honorifics entail this factor. In addition, Gu fails to distinguish those factors that pertain to “binary opposites” from those belonging to “scales”. In his earlier (1990) analysis, Gu touches on such a distinction in passing but makes no explication. In his later work (Gu, 1992), there is not even a mention of such an issue. This failure would affect the effective application of the Address Maxim and the Self-denigration Maxim in that it does not make a clearly 78 delineated interrelation between the types of variables affecting the choice of specific address terms and the types of terms actually chosen. This observation is supported by our preliminary investigation of the ST data, which shows that while factors pertaining to binary opposites are exclusively associated with the use of titles, scale-type factors primarily contribute to the use of honorifics. This differentiation should be significant in helping a learner of Chinese terms of address to make focused and better-targeted effort while handling different types of address terms. 2.4 FRAMEWORK CONSTRUCTION The frameworks used for data analysis are Gu’s Address and Self-denigrations Maxims and Sun’s four principles governing the use of address terms in HLM. This section is concerned with a representation of the mechanism of the two frameworks. 2.4.1 Gu’s Maxims Whereas Gu (1990:237) points out that his account of the politeness phenomenon concerns itself with modern Chinese, we find it applies more readily to social titles and honorific expressions in Chinese written before the turn of the twentieth century when social and political transformation and turmoils broke out one after another which destroyed and distorted many of the established social practices, address behaviour included. One case in point is that, after the 1911 Revolution, 先生 ( Mr.) was extended to female professionals, 太 太 (Mrs.) and 小 姐 (Miss) were popularized to the wife and daughter of common men respectively. Another case in point lies in the unified use of 同 志 (comrade) as both a unisex commendatory and respectful term of address for all adults throughout the country since the communist rule. In this respect, Gu’s (ibid:256) 79 reiterations in his concluding remarks that the modern Chinese he has in mind “is the language taught at schools and universities, and used in mass media”, and that the politeness phenomenon he attempts to capture “can be said to be generally prevailing among the (fairly) educated”, serve as a misnomer. Therefore, his Address Maxim, upon moderate adaptation, can be usefully applied to our study as a culture-specific framework whereby the various pragmatic factors governing the linguistic realisations for politeness address behaviour in HLM can be objectively accounted for. As far the Self-denigration Maxim is concerned, it provides a theoretical tool to be used, first, to account for the use of an Other-elevating or Self-denigrating expression in the ST, and, second, to assess its accessibility and plausibility in the TT. To make Gu’s maxims better able to encapsulate the cultural values of the Chinese titles and honorifics and their respective English renditions under investigation, the following adaptations are made to the maxims so that they serve as a framework for data analysis in the forthcoming chapters. To begin with, a specification of the factors contributing to the choice of Chinese terms of address is necessary. In this respect, a total of six factors are spelt out: (1) kin, (2) social position, (3) age, (4) marital status, (5) gender, and (6) formality. This modification, although reduces Gu’s factors from nine to six, specifies the factor of marital status. Second, differentiation is made between factors to be valuated in terms of binary opposites and those by means of scales, with reference to the type of address terms used. To be specific, where a title is used, all the six factors are to be evaluated on the basis of binary opposites. Since one addressee/referent has only one title, its use in formal, public 80 interactions becomes compulsory rather than optional. In other words, the use of a singular title presupposes the ponderance of formality (factor (6)). This thus leaves us five factors to be considered. Here, factor (1) kin is opposed to non-kin, with the former comprising family members and relatives, and the latter colleagues and friends. For factors (2) (social position) and (3) (age), ego’s status quo is taken into consideration in contrast with that of the addressee/referent, that is, with reference to the binary variables of senior versus junior. Whereas factor (4) (marital status) is measured in terms of (being) married versus unmarried, and factor (5) (gender) in terms of male versus female. However, things become a bit complicated when it comes to the evaluation of the factors governing the use of honorifics. While factors (1) to (5) remain constant (i.e., as binary opposites), factor (6) (formality) posits a problem when analysed simply in terms of formal versus informal. This is because some honorifics do not pertain to a singular category of choices and invalidate the assessment of binary opposites. A preliminary look at the data shows that two sets of other-elevating honorifics come with alternatives: (1)兄 (elder brother), its derivatives 尊兄( respectable elder brother), 贾兄 (elder brother Jia), 老 兄 (old elder brother), and 雨村兄 (elder brother Yucun), and (2) 先生 (mister) and its compound 老先生 (old mister). To better differentiate the degree of formality between each set of honorifics, scales have to be in place. 2.4.2 Sun’s Principles Although this study is exclusively concerned with the use of titles and honorifics in the first twelve chapters of HLM, and with a comparison/contrast of their translations in the five English versions, Sun’s principles are relevant in that they help to classify the 81 various renditions. Preliminary survey of the data showed that, the translators concerned have come up with different solutions for the ST titles and honorifics in question, including titles, seeming honorific expressions, kinship terms and personal pronouns. Therefore, Sun’s principles are in place to better encapsulate the cultural values represented by the specific renditions. Demonstration of the use will be presented in 2.5.1.3 below. 2.5 METHODOLOGY The foregoing review of the relevant literature and the revision of Gu’s maxims seem to put us at a vantage point where the research methodology of the study can be presented. This part will spell out both the marking system and research procedures. 2.5.1 Marking Systems In our future analysis, the cultural representations of the factors governing the use of address terms, i.e., cultural values (to be shortened as C-values hereinafter) embodied in a Chinese term and its various English renditions respectively, will be extracted against the six factors modified above for Gu’s Address and Self-denigration Maxims. 2.5.1.1 Marking of ST Titles Since formality can be assumed as omnipresent in the occurrence of each title in question, the C-values of titles are to be measured against the other five factors of binary opposites. In this respect, the marking is simple and straightforward: if a factor can be identified from a Chinese title used, it will be seen to have a C-value, and a word is used 82 to stand for that value. The listing of these words add up to the total C-values of a title in question. For instance, the use of the title 太太 (lady) can be identified to represent such C-values as “non-kin relation”. “female”, “married”, higher social position”, and “formal”. The title is differentiated from 姑娘 (miss) merely in terms of the factor of “unmarried” the latter represents because both titles share all the other C-values. 2.5.1.2 Marking of ST Honorifics As far as honorifics are considered, differentiation has to be first made to determine whether an honorific is a singular expression or one from a set of variations. As the differentiation implies, the former is an honorific which comes with no variations. For the type of honorifics, marking of their C-values can be simply done in line with the way whereby titles are marked for their C-values. That is, every factor identifiable will be marked in opposites. Take 尊夫人 (your respectable lady) for instance. While the factor of age might be implicit here, four of the other five factors are self-evident to a Chinese user: i.e., formal, higher social position, marital, and female. This is so because, first of all, the employment of the honorific itself implies formality (respect and deference) of interaction. Otherwise, the full or personal name of the referent, or a kinship term, could otherwise be used. Secondly, the head term 夫人 (madam) presupposes a married female whose social position which is seen by the addresser as higher than that held of his wife, since the term was exclusively used to the wife of a rich man or an official before the 1911 Revolution. However, it has to be noted that 尊夫人 semantically denotes the in-law relationship of the referent with the addressee, thus kinship C-value. 83 With respect to the marking of the two sets of paronymous honorifics, i.e., (1) 兄 and its derivatives 尊兄, 贾兄, 老兄, and 雨村兄, and (2) 先生 and its compound 老先生, while the other factors can be evaluated in terms of opposites, scales have to be applied to evaluate the degree of formality, since a simple positive or negative value would fail to encapsulate the delicacies of the variations. To better represent the degrees of the formality connoted in each of the paronyms, both sets will be evaluated along a formality continuum from informal (casual) to most formal. By locating the root honorific as a neutral or central point of departure, we can determine and compare the extent of formality/familarity of each paronymous honorific before aligning them on the continuum. Take for instance 兄 and its derivatives 尊 兄 , 贾 兄 , 老 兄 , and 雨 村 兄 . The monosyllabic expression 兄 (elder brother), as the root, is seen as neutral in so far as its degree of formality is concerned. Starting from this basic term, we can locate 雨村兄 (elder brother Yucun) at the more informal end of the formality continuum, and 尊兄 (respectable elder brother) at the opposing end, i.e. the more polite or formal end. This scaling can find justification on two grounds. Since Chapter Five will illustrate on the semantics, origin and use of the honorific 兄 and its derivatives, a mention of these two justifications here will suffice. First, since 兄 already contains the semantics of “being older and thus respectable” and the pragmatics of “someone with whom one shares parent(s)”, its intensification by the epithet 尊 obviously enhances the degree of respect, thus adding to the level of formality. With regard to 雨村兄, the addition of the addressee’s personal or courtesy name to the honorific 兄 proper serves to mitigate the tone of the addresser and marks more familiarity between the interactants. This is so simply because in old Chinese societies, people’s courtesy names used to be a taboo to be avoided as 84 vocatives. Second, in interactions between friends, the tendency in address behaviour is from being formal to less formal along with the increase of familiarity between the dyads. As Chao (1956:225) succinctly points out, The prefixing of courtesy name before [a title] is however only available to equals, since this formula (…) is adopted with the ultimate object of dropping the [title]. (…) If mentioned by courtesy only, it implies greater intimacy. As a corollary, 老兄 (old elder brother) stands in between 雨村兄 and 兄 on the more informal side of the continuum. This is so because in Chinese the most intimate or causal way for a speaker to address his friend would be to use his personal or courtesy name as a vocative, and the prefixing of 老 means “socially equivalent to dropping” any title (Chao, 1956:221) – though a person can alternate his address from time to time, even to the same addressee, as Zhen Shiyin does in our data. This analysis also applies to the other set of paronymous honorifics, i.e., 先生 and its compound 老先生. On the more formal side of the scale, i.e., between 兄 and 尊兄, we can locate 贾兄 (elder brother Jia). Here, the use of the addressee’s family name marks more familiarity (and thus less formality) than 尊兄 does, but not so familiar as to resorting to the courtesy name of the hearer. This said, we can project the continuum where 兄 and its four derivatives fare on the scale of formality/familiarity schematically as: Figure 2.3: Line-up of 兄 and its derivatives on the formality continuum 85 2.5.1.3 Marking of English Renditions When it comes to the identifying the C-values contained by the various renditions the translators offer for the ST titles and honorifics under investigation, things seem more complicated. This is because our preliminary investigation revealed that the renditions that are available pertain not only to titles and seeming honorific expressions, but also kinship terms and personal pronouns. To better encapsulate the C-values of the renditions, classification will first be made with reference to Sun’s four principles before the renditions can be marked and compared (with both their ST originals and their English counterparts respectively) for their C-values with regard to the factors formulated for Gu’s maxims. Generally, if a translator replaces a ST title or honorific with something that is different in nature from its ST counterpart – for instance, with a kinship term or personal pronoun – that solution represents a conspicuous domestication. This can be accounted for by the fact that the rendition constitutes a bold violation of the ST’s address behaviour. Valuewise, if a translator renders a title or honorific into a kinship term, one or more of the factors underscoring the appropriate use of the ST address term in question will either be changed to the opposite of the two binary opposites for its ST counterpart, or become totally absent. In the case of personal pronouns, all factors (but the gender for the thirdperson singular pronouns, i.e., “he”, “she”) are lost without any trace. As far as the ST honorifics to be assessed in terms of scales are concerned, their renditions might also fail to represent the degree of formality whereby the paronymous honorifics are differentiated 86 in the ST. To demonstrate these possibilities, as well as to show how the C-values of an English rendition are evaluated, a couple of examples are necessary. Take for instance the title 老太太 (old lady). As a title, it represents the C-values of (1) formal, (2) female, (3) married with son(s), (4) senior in age (with son in charge of the house), (5) senior social position (with son(s) holding official rank), and (6) (addressed as) non-kin. However, when a translator supplies the kinship term your grandmother for 老太太, as Hawkes would do when, suppose, it is Xifeng who speaks to Baoyu with reference to the their grandmother, the Lady Dowager, only three of ST title’s C-values remain the same or nearly the same in your grandmother, i.e., (2) female, (3) married (with children) and (4) senior in age. While non-kin (factor 6) has changed to kin and formality (factor 1) has lost to familial setting, the greatest change lies in the oblivion of the social position of the referent. Besides, if the rendition for 老太太 is she or her, what remains visible of the C-values of the ST title is no more than the female gender. Since such renditions represent a nearly a total loss of the C-values of their ST originals, they can only align on the domesticating end of the D-F continuum. Mention has also to be made that, in cases where a ST term has more than one rendition in a translation, the two choices that register the most frequencies will be taken as the normative options of the translator in question. Once the normative choices of a translator for a ST term are identified, their C-values will be subsequently identified and 87 then contrasted with those of their ST originals. Theoretically, the more a rendition represents the C-values of its ST counterpart, the closer it is to the Chinese mode of expression and behaviour of address, and the more foreignized it appears in terms of Venuti’s dichotomy of translation strategies. 2.6 CONCLUSION This review focused on two fields of study, i.e., translation strategies and politeness theories, with two sub-foci in each. The former is concerned with dichotomies of translation strategies, and studies of the English versions of HLM with reference to translation strategies used. The latter covers perspectives of politeness in general and English and Chinese address forms in specific. The review finds that, despite their conceptual differences, the strategies all seem to boil down to a literal-free dichotomy. Importantly, it shows that, whereas the various equivalence-based strategies pay exclusive attention to linguistic features in both the ST and TT, both Schleirmacher’s alienating-naturalising and Venuti’s foreignizing-domesticating take cognizance of the linguistic, sociocultural and political factors surrounding the production of translations. And this justifies our adoption of Venuti’s dichotomy both as cover terms for translation strategies and as realisations of the cultural contents of the titles and honorifics in the five English versions of HLM. The review also indicates that despite the conceptual difference, agreement seems to have been reached in terms of the strategies whereby Hawkes and Yangs’s versions are translated, i.e., the former as a production of what Venuti calls a domesticating strategy, and the latter as an outcome of what he sees as a foreignizing approach. However, the review also highlights the major inadequacies of these studies, 88 i.e., weakness in theoretical (non-)argumentation, unsystematicity of the approaches taken, and limited versions (mostly two) compared. Since these inadequacies not only throw doubt on the validity of the conclusions made, but also leave the other three English versions virtually untouched and theoretically unconcluded, they therefore necessitate the present study. With regard to the second primary focus of the review, the review finds that, albeit the fact that politeness is a universal phenomenon, there are culture-specific rules or maxims that govern the operation of politeness behaviour in different languages or cultures. Significantly, it is observed that both Brown and Levinson, and Leech’s universalistic perspective of politeness in language use fails to capture the culture-specific use of address forms in both English and Chinese. It is Gu and Sun’s approaches to Chinese titles and honorifics that better account for the cultural differences of Chinese address behaviour. And it is on this account that they are adapted for application to our analysis of the data in the next three chapters. 89 CHAPTER 3 TITLES (I) 3.0 OVERVIEW Conceptually, title is taken to include “all nominal variants except names” “which are bestowed, achieved by appointment…or are inherited” (Braun, 1998:10). Both this and the next chapter are devoted to a comparison of the five versions of HLM in terms of their renditions of titles showcasing the social status of the addressees and referents used in first twelve chapters of the Chinese novel. These titles are used unanimously by both the masters and their servants in the Jia House to address and talk about other Jia masters in public gatherings or private interactions. In this perspective, titles “are absolute instead of relative” (Chao, 1956:223). As such, differentiation will be particularly made in terms of who use the titles and to whom they are applied, i.e., the speaker versus the addressee/referent. Specifically, the values of the titles in question and their renditions will be measured against the different culturally and situationally factors which might influence the choice of appropriate titles “under the rubric of interactants’ relative position in the social hierarchy” (House, 1998:59). As aforementioned in Chapter 2, the use of terms to indicate social status of the dyad pertains to the dimension of social stratification (Sun, 1990). According to Robinson (1972:129), in those societies in which a person’s status derives from his or her achievements, fewer distinctions in address are made. In such societies people 90 may use only one basic form of address; they rely on other means for signalling the variety of relationships that we must presume still exists. However, in societies where status is ascribed, i.e., derived from birth into a particular social group, we are much more likely to find sets of finely graded address terms, which reflect the social structure of those societies. Data from the English of North America and from a highly stratified society like Java seem to illustrate the two extremes; data from Japan and Korea also suggest that these societies are much more stratified and that social position within them is more ascribed than earned in contrast to the situations in either North America or the United Kingdom (Wardhaugh, 1998:270). As far as the Chinese society is concerned, although research findings in this respect are not available, our data from the first twelve chapters of HLM confirm this hypothesis and tells us something about the practice of strict social stratification in feudal China. Among the four categories of terms of address used in the novel, the one used for social stratification registers most instances (i.e., twenty-seven entries with 299 occurrences all together). This should come as no wonder since the practice was stringently observed even between family members of the Jia House. Table 3.1 below summarises the thirteen terms signalling the social status of the masters in the Jia House that are found in our ST corpus. Faced with the vast amount of titles which highlight a speaker’s awareness of the tangible social distance between him/her and the addressee and/or referent, how should a translator render these terms in a way that could both represent the codes of address and value systems of the Chinese society? This thus constitutes the main issue 91 of this chapter. In this study, the titles and their renditions will be synthesised into two major categories: (1) titles used to female masters of the Jia House, including 太太, 老 太太, 奶奶 and 姑娘; (2) titles applied to male Jia masters, consisting of 太爷, 老爷 and 大爷; and (3) other minor titles which consist of 公, 爷,小爷, 老夫人, 太夫人, 夫人, 小姐, and 姨太太. While the first category will be discussed in this chapter, the second in Chapter 4. The third category will be dismissed from discussion on two accounts. First, these titles register a few limited instances of use in the corpus and thus do not seem to constitute what Wierzbicka (1991) regards as “cultural key words”. Second, the renditions the translators offered for these titles (see Table 3.2 below) demonstrate more similarities than differences and therefore do not seem to reveal much about their respective strategies of translation. Table 3.1 Titles for the Jias in the corpus Term Amount Pronunciation Designation Literal Meaning 太太 48 tai tai A peerage or official’s wife Grand-grand 老太太 28 lao tai tai The (widowed) mother of a peerage or official Old grand-grand 奶奶 34 nai nai Wife of a junior master Breast-breast 姑娘 31 gu niang An unmarried daughter of a peerage or rich family Young girl 姨太太 12 yi tai tai Married sister of a peerage or official’s wife Aunt grand-grand 老爷 18 lao ye A senior master with a nobility rank Old grand sire 太爷 20 tai ye The father of a peerage or official Grand grand sire 爷 14 ye Junior master of a peerage or official’s family Grand sire 大爷 11 da ye Junior masters of a peerage or rich family Big grand sire 公 8 gong Dukedom, the highest of the Chinese peerage Revered Mr. 夫人 1 fu ren Wife of a high official Husband’s person 老/太夫人 2 lao/tai fu ren The widowed mother of a peerage or official Old/Grand lady 小姐 2 xiao jie Unmarried daughter of a peerage or rich family Little miss Total: 13 233 92 Table 3.2: Renditions of minor titles for the Jias Term Amount Hawkes Yangs Joly 姨太太 12 Mrs Xue 8 Madam Hsueh 3 ‘aunt’ Hsüeh 4 宁/荣公 8 The Duke of 5 The Duke of 6 The Duke of 赦公 2 Sir She 2 Chia She 2 Mr. Chia She 2 政公 2 Sir Zheng 2 Chia Cheng 2 Mr. Chia Cheng 1 小姐 2 the daughter of 2 a/the daughter of 2 the daughter of 2 夫人 1 the wife of the wife of the wife of 太夫人 1 the old lady the Lady Dowager 老夫人 1 Old Lady Jia Lady Dowager Shih McHugh Wang His (Jia Daishan’s) the Princess Madame Shih wife Ancestress 4 dowager lady Shih the Matriarch Titles used to indicate the social status of various female masters, old and young, married or unmarried, in the Jia House constitute nearly half (141 instances) of all the 299 cases of titles found in our data. This can be accounted for from two aspects. First, female masters are the key and most active figures in the novel since they have the power to live and let live. And second, the novel is basically a romance in a prestigious noble family centring on the fate of the young master Baoyu and his love and hatred of the girls around. This chapter will investigate the use and renderings of four major female titles, i.e., 太太, 老太太, 奶奶 and 姑娘, with emphasis on their C-values and the strategies that were probably adopted in the process of translating. 3.1 太太 3.1.1 Origin and Use According to the Complete Chinese Dictionary (4:1463)1, 太太as a title attributed to 1 Called《汉语大词典》in Chinese, the dictionary consists of eight volumes, each with about 2,000 pages. Since the pagination in each volume is separate, the volume number is thus indicated when referencing. 93 married women has two major uses. Conventionally, it is primarily used in addressing or referring to the wife of an official. Related to this is its use by the servants of the official to address their lady master. After the 1911 Revolution, an extension of this use was applied to married women in general and was often prefixed with the surname of the husband. For these uses, the term elevates women thus addressed/referred to to the status of being “grand-grand” (Chao, 1956: 224), and seems equivalent to the English expressions “madame” and “lady” (Chinese English Dictionary: 2460). In our data (see Table 3.3 below), the “official” use prevails, referring exclusively to the chief wives (rather than concubines) of the two senior Jia brothers (Jia She and Jia Zheng) in the Rong-guo Mansion, i.e., Lady Xing and Lady Wang respectively. This therefore calls into question the seemingly “ready” English expressions “madame” and “lady” as the counterparts of the Chinese term. This is because their husbands are not ordinary officials. Instead they enjoy a high and two-fold social status. On the one hand, they are the grandsons of the Duke of Rong-guo Mansion, which means that they pertain to peerage ranks. On the other hand, they both attain official posts: Jia She as “hereditary general of the first rank” (一等将军) (Yangs, 1978:34) and Jia Zheng as “under secretary in the Board of Works” (工部员外郎) (ibid) which ranked “the by-fifth degree” (从五品)2 in the Qing officialdom (Lu, 1994:912). 2 Officials in feudal China were distinguished into nine grades, with two sub-grades in each. In contemporary terms, while the by-first grade is equal to a deputy post, the first grade to a principal one. As far as our data is concerned, Jia Zheng held a post at the rank of by-fifth grade (从五品). As for Yu-cun, he was a magistrate before he was dismissed by the emperor, thus holding a seventh grade. He later climbed to the post of a prefecture judicial governor. This ranked him as high as the fourth grade, thus the power of his later interrogating and confiscating the Jia House. Xi-feng’s husband Jia Lian purchased a sub-prefect (同知) post which ranked at a by-six grade. 94 Table 3.3: Use of 太太 in the corpus Usage 太 太 大太太 Dyad Amount Mode Xifeng – Lady Wang 5 Address Mrs Zhen – Lady Wang 1 Xifeng – Baoyu 3 Keqing – Xifeng 2 Xifeng – Mrs Zhou, Granny Liu 3 Jia Qiang – Jia Rui 3 Nannie Li – Baoyu 1 Maid – Baoyu, Daiyu 1 Mrs Zhou – Xifeng, Pinger, Baoyu 10 Servant – Jia Dairu 1 Granny Liu – servant, boy 2 Between servants 5 Mrs Zhou – Granny Liu Jia Zhen’s wife – son Jia Rong 二太太 太太们 Reference Lady Wang 3 Reference Jia ladies 1 Reference Lady Xing 1 Jia Zhen’s wife – Lady Xing & Wang 3 Jia Rong – mother (Mrs Zhen) 2 Xifeng – Jia Rui 1 Xifeng – Mrs Zhen 1 Maid – Xifeng 1 Total Referent Lady Wang Address Reference Lady Xing & Wang 50 Table 3.3 above shows that while at least seventy percent of 太太 in the corpus is used to address/refer to Lady Wang exclusively, the term registers three variations. Apart from the plural form 太太们 (Ladies) which refers to both Lady Xing and Lady Wang, there appear two other singular forms, i.e., 大太太 (Big Lady) and 二太太 (Second Lady), which designate the two ladies respectively. This use, i.e., marking the sequence of birth by modifiers 大 (eldest rather than first), 二 (second (eldest)), 三 (third (eldest)) and so on before the key form of address, reflects the particular Chinese attention paid to the age/seniority difference between siblings. In the table, “dyad” indicates both the speaker and the addressee, i.e., who is speaking to whom. 95 As for the “referent”, it coincides with the addressee per se in the “mode” of “address” (i.e., when addressing someone directly), but refers to a third person in the “mode” of “reference” (i.e., when talking about someone). The reason why different dyad’s use of the term in question is distinguished is two-fold. One the one hand, it serves to show how social stratification is stringently observed even between family members. On the other, it will help to highlight, where relevant, the kin relation between the dyad and thus justify a translator’s rendering of a title by means of a kinship term. “Amount” in the table stands for the total sum of occurrences of the title used by a speaker. Given the above information, the C-values contained by the general title 太太 as used in our corpus can be formulated as: (1) formal interactions, (2) a non-kin, (3) female, (4) married (to a man with official position and in charge of the house), (5) with social position, (6) not young While all the three derivatives of 太太 share these values, 大太太 and 二太太 are differentiated by the relative order of their respective husbands’ birth with reference to factor (6), i.e., “eldest” and “second” respectively in seniority of the same generation. As for the plural title 太太们 used in a generic manner to both Jai ladies, it differs slightly from 太太 in terms of the numbers of the kin concerned: two non-kins. 3.1.2 Renditions of 太太 Theoretically, a translator will have to take into consideration the aforementioned cultural values in determining a suitable English substitute for 太太 and its variations. 96 Besides, the social status of the husbands of the referents should also be a factor of consideration. In this respect, a stringent domesticator might follow Beyfus (1992) or Wallace (2002), and come up with titles for the two Jia masters and their wives respectively as: (1) For Jia She and wife: as the eldest son of the Duke, Jia She might well be formally addressed as “The Most Honourable The Marquess of Rong-guo” and saluted as “My Lord (Rong-guo)”, and referred to as “(The) Lord Rong-guo”. Similarly, his wife Lady Xing should be addressed as “The Most Honourable the Marchioness of Rong-guo”, saluted as “Madam”, and referred to as “(The) Lady Rong-guo” respectively. (2) For Jia Zheng and wife: notwithstanding the official position he holds, as the Duke’s younger son, Jia Zheng should be addressed as “The Lord Jia Zheng” in the formal manner, saluted as “My Lord” and referred to as “(The) Lord (Jia) Zheng”. His wife, on the other hand, should be addressed as “The Lady Jia Zheng”, saluted as “My Lady” or “Madam”, and referred to as “(The) Lady (Jia) Zheng”. Besides these “official” domestications, other “unofficial” domestications which do not indicate the social status of the addressee/referents can also be predicated. Depending on the kin relation between the speakers and the addressees/referents, kinship terms might be expected of a domesticating translator who intends to present a clear interpersonal relationship to the reader. For instance, Xifeng, Lady Wang’s niece, may address Lady Wang as “aunt”, and speak of her as “your mother” to Baoyu, etc. In the same way, Jia Rong, son of Jia Zhen in the Ning-guo Mansion who is two degrees removed from the two Jia Ladies, may “use” “(my) great aunts” to address and/or talk about the ladies. Likewise, the maids may be made to refer to Lady Wang as “your mother” when speaking to Baoyu. On the other hand, foreignized renditions can also be proposed, ranging from the diametrical ones that go beyond the comprehension of the TT reader to the moderate 97 ones. Based on their semantic meaning and pragmatic function, 太 太 and its derivatives can each have a set of options ranging on the F-D continuum as: (1) 太太: tai-tai, grand lady, Madame/Lady Rong-guo (for Lady Xing)/Lady Zheng (for Lady Wang), your/her ladyship, Lady LN, aunt/your mother/grant-aunt (2) 太太们: tai-tai, grand ladies, mesdames/ladies, your/their ladyships, aunts/great-aunts (3) 大太太: big tai-tai, eldest grand lady, Madame/Lady Rong-guo, Lady Xing, your/her ladyship, aunt/great-aunt (4) 二太太: second tai-tai, second grand lady, Madame/Lady Zheng, Lady Wang, your/her ladyship, aunt/your mother/great-aunt However, prior to the most domesticating options, there might be a personal pronoun such as “you” for face-to-face address and “she/her” and/or “they/them” for reference respectively. 3.1.2.1 Hawkes’s 太太 Of the five English translations, Hawkes’s renditions of 太太 and its derivatives register the widest but most systematic variations. A look at Hawkes’s forty-four renderings for the Chinese title (see Table 3.4 below) reveals nine different semantic sets of address forms with conspicuous tendency of domestication. Apart from the eight pronominals (i.e., you and she), Hawkes’s renditions fall into three clearly identifiable pragmatic categories: (1) honorific terms of reference used between masters and servants, i.e., sixteen her ladyship; (2) compound titles in the form of TLN, i.e., six Lady Xing and Lady Wang; (3) kinship terms primarily used between family members to address/refer to the ladies, such as (your) mother, aunite, aunt and Great-aunt. Contrasted with their ST counterparts, Hawkes’s renditions by means of English 98 titles, kinship terms and pronouns all fail to represent some or even most of the C-values of their Chinese originals. With regard to his kinship terms as both address and reference, not only do aunt, auntie and Grant-aunt change the finite marital status of the Chinese referents into a questionable one, they also seem to “expresses a momentary emotional attitude to the addressee[/referent] rather than a permanent interpersonal relationship” (Wierzbicka, 1992:339). With the loss of the “absolute” (Chao, 1956:223) relationship construed by the ST title, the stringent social distance and deference contained in the semantics of the ST title are replaced with “a spirit of familiarity, respect and affection” (Wierzbicka, 1992:339). Of all the five translators, Hawkes adopts the least official terms for 太太 and its derivatives. Of his forty-four renditions, only twenty-two take the form of either Lady+LN or her ladyship. Even these “official” titles, upon closer examination, are found to be false friends of 太太 and its compounds. This observation can find evidence from three aspects. First, in line with Beyfus’s (1992) guidance of Modes of Address, native speakers of English did and do speak of the wives of the peerage from the rank of Marquess down to Baron with the titles “Lady” and “Ladyship”. However, whereas “Her Ladyship” might be seen as an acceptable reference to such ladies, it is not coined in the strict sense of domestic British expressions, which, according to Beyfus (1992) and Wallace (2002), should respectively be “(The) Lady + Estate name” for the wife of the elder son (i.e., Lady Xing) and “(The) Lady + FN/FFN (of the husband)” for the wife of the younger son. Secondly, more doubt can also be raised about Hawkes’s configuration of “Lady + LN”. If Beyfus (1992) and Wallace (2002) are any 99 authority to follow, what follows “Lady” should be the husband’s title or first name, rather than the her own last name. And thirdly, the seeming English titles change the Chinese finite variable for (married) marital status into a dubious one, since lady(ship) is not marked for being married as the Chinese 太太 is. While “official” domestication cannot hold water here, Hawkes’s renditions Lady Wang and Lady Xing have to be scrutinised from a foreignizing perspective. Here it is found that they look like social titles used to convey the proper social respect of the speakers for the addressees/referents. However, it has to be noted that this nondescript renditions results from the translator’s invention since no family name but just prefixes indicating the order of their husbands’ birth is employed in the ST to distinguish one lady from another. Therefore, the addition of the ladies’ family names, while distinguishing the ladies in explicit terms, loses the exclusionistic nature of the ST title. Also note that the addition of the ladies’ family names fail to represent the crucial cultural value of their Chinese counterparts, namely to differentiate brothers and sisters (and their spouses as an extension) pertaining to the same hierarchical generation in terms of birth sequence. 100 Table 3.4: Renditions of 太太 in Hawkes, Yangs and Joly Chinese Usage Dyad English Amount Referent Hawkes 3 5 you 4; Aunt Wang 1 Mrs Zhen – Lady Wang 1 Xifeng – Baoyu Joly you 4; madam you, madame 4 You You madame Wang 3 your mother 3 your mother; Her Ladyship 2 your mother; Her Ladyship 2 Keqing – Xifeng 2 Auntie Wang 2 Lady Wang 2 madame Wang Xifeng – Mrs Zhou, Granny Liu 3 Her Ladyship 3 Lady Wang; Her Ladyship 2 madame; our lady 2 Jia Qiang – Jia Rui 3 Lady Wang 2 Lady Wang 3 madame Wang; our lady Nannie Li – Baoyu 1 your mother Lady Wang your mother Maid – Baoyu, Daiyu 1 the Mistress Her Ladyship my lady Mrs Zhou – Xifeng, Pinger, Baoyu 10 her Ladyship 7; she Her Ladyship 9 our lady 3; madame Wang Servant – Jia Dairu 1 Lady Wang Her Ladyship Narrative Granny Liu – servant, boy 2 her Ladyship 2 Lady Wang 2 my lady 2 Between servants 5 her Ladyship 4; Lady Wang Her Ladyship; Lady Wang 3; our mistress madame Wang 2; lady Wang; our mistress 太 太 Mrs Zhou – Granny Liu 3 Jia ladies their ladies the ladies my lady 3 大太太 Jia Zhen’s wife – son Jia Rong 1 Lady Xing Not translated Lady Hsing mesdames Hsing and Wang 1 Lady Wang Sir Zheng & Lady Wang Lady Wang ladies; you (both) 2 you 3 (my) great-aunts 2 included in “the elder generation”, my aunts Her Ladyship the ladies 太 太 Xifeng – Lady Wang Yangs 4 二太太 太太们 Total Lady Wang Jia Zhen’s wife – Lady Xing & Wang 3 Jia Rong – mother (Mrs Zhen) 2 Lady Xing Xifeng – Jia Rui 1 & Wang Xifeng – Mrs Zhen 1 mother and Aunt Wang their Ladyships the senior ladies Maid – Xifeng 1 Lady Xing and Lady Wang the ladies the ladies 50 44 madame Wang; my ladies; you senior ladies 44 the ladies the senior ladies; the two ladies 39 3 Where a speaker’s addresses/references are rendered with different terms, they are distinguished by a semicolon (;). In cases where two or three figures appear in sequence but separated by semicolons, the first figure indicates the amount for the first form of renditions of the ST term in question, the second figure represents the amount for the second form of renditions, and so on. Note that the total amount of renditions may not correspond to that of the ST title. This is because the translators make adaptations in accordance with English grammatical requirements. 4 101 To conclude our investigation of Hawkes, it seems safe to say that his choices align more on the domesticating side of the F-D continuum. Secondly, a scrutiny of his renditions enables us to identify an underlying rule designed to capture the interpersonal variables between the speakers and hearer/referent under the formula of “Who-is-speaking-to-whom-about-whom”. Clearly, both addresses and references to the two senior Jia ladies are distinguished in accordance with both the speakers’ gender and their social distance to the ladies concerned. Take for instance both Xifeng’s addresses and Keqing’s references to Lady Wang, i.e., Aunt Wang and Auntie Wang respectively. Given that both speakers are female and, as will be clear in our discussion later on, have close relations with Lady Wang, such substitutes help show the intimate personal relations between the dyads concerned. Consistent with these kinship terms are Jia Rong’s (Keqing’s husband) references to the senior Jia ladies as Great-aunts when speaking to his mother Mrs Zhen. Apart from these kinships and the pronouns, Hawkes generally attempts to represent the kind of respect both remote Jia juniors and their servants hold for the senior ladies. This is done by converting 50% of 太太 into (sixteen) Her Ladyship and (six) Lady+LN. 3.1.2.2 Yangs’太太 Yangs’ renditions register seven variations: you, madam, your mother, Lady LN, your/her/their ladyship(s), the ladies, and our mistress. Compared with Hawkes’s obvious domesticating treatment of the term 太太 and its three compounds, Yangs’ renderings of them (see Table 3.4 above) look like productions with a more evident foreignizing inclination. This is so because thirty-two (73%) of their forty-four renditions concentrate on two formal or 102 official titles: Lady LN (fourteen) and her Ladyship (eighteen). While Yangs adopt only one kinship term, i.e., your mother in Eg.2 below, they use the most (eight) second-person pronoun you. The titles Lady LN and her ladyship (as shown Eg.4 and 5 below) constitute Yangs’ normative choices, and represent three of the four C-values of their ST counterpart 太 太, and three of the five C-values of 大太太 and 二太太, which is the same as those identified for those of Hawkes above. This finding conforms to our hypothesis that a foreignizing strategy results in renditions that represent more of the C-values of the ST term in question. A closer look at these variations reveals the following features. Formally, the domesticating distinction of users of 太太 according to their social status and gender, as is identified in Hawkes’s translation, is no where to be found. Like their ST original, a great majority of 太太 are “indiscriminately” rendered into Lady LN and/or Her Ladyship. And like Hawkes’s renditions in this respect, this treatment can be seen as a seemingly “faithful” reproduction of the ST titles in that stringent social respect is observed in the TT when people, even family members, address or make reference to the Jia ladies in this formal term. Therefore, no close personal or family relationship between a speaker (e.g., Xifeng) and the addressee/referent (most probably Lady Wang) can be seen from a varied term of address, like Hawkes’s Aunt, Auntie, etc. Functionally, these renderings are intended fro a communicative environment similar to that of their original: to show proper social respect for, rather than personal intimacy with, the addressees/referents. And culturally, these renditions tend to reflect more Chinese values in address behaviour. Of course, it is another matter that Yangs’ renditions with such titles take after neither English nor Chinese mode of expression, a problem which is also identified in Hawkes’s renditions in this respect. 103 However, Yangs fail to represent four of Xifeng’s addresses by title to Lady Wang and one of her reference to her. Of the four addresses which are replaced by the pronominal form you – as Hawkes does, three appear in Chapter 3 at the reception of Daiyu at Dowager Lady Jia’s Rong-guo Mansion. The other is used in Chapter 12 when Jia Dairu, a remote but senior descendant of the clan, comes for Xifeng’s help for some ginseng as medicine to save the life of his orphan grandson Jia Rui, who is infatuated with his cousin sister-in-law Xifeng and then entrapped to death. Understandably, the translations of these interactions of Xifeng with Lady Wang read more fluent when the more potential options (i.e., “Your Ladyship”) are replaced by the more interactive you, as the following conversation and Yangs’ translation of them at Daiyu’s reception show. Eg.1: ORIGINAL: 说话时， 已摆了茶果上来。熙凤亲为捧茶捧果。又见二舅母问他：“月钱放过了不曾？” 熙凤道：“月钱已放完 “有 了。才刚带着人到后楼上找缎子，找了这半日，也并没有见昨日太太说的那样的，想是太太记错了？” 王夫人道： 没有，什么要紧。” 因又说道： “该随手拿出两个来给你这妹妹去裁衣裳的，等晚上想着叫人再去拿罢，可别忘了。” 熙 凤道： “这倒是我先料着了，知道妹妹不过这两日到的，我已预备下了，等太太回去过了目好送来。” 王夫人一笑，点 头不语。(曹雪芹and高鹗, 1982:42-3) TRANSLATIONS: (1) Hawkes (1973: 92-3) While Xi-feng was speaking, the servants brought in tea and various plates of food, the distribution of which she proceeded to supervise in person. Dai-yu noticed her Aunt Wang questioning Xi-feng on the side: ‘Have this month’s allowances been paid out yet?’ ‘Yes. By the way, just now I went with some of the women to the upstairs storeroom at the back to look for that satin. We looked and looked, but we couldn’t find any like the one you described yesterday. Perhaps you misremembered.’ ‘Oh well, if you can’t find it, it doesn’t really matter,’ said Lady Wang. Then, after a moment’s reflection, ‘You’d better pick out a couple of lengths presently to have made up into clothes for your little cousin here. If you think of it, send someone round in the evening to fetch them!’ ‘It’s already been seen to. I knew she was going to arrive within a day or two, so I had some brought out in readiness. They are waiting back at your place for your approval. If you think they are all right, they can be sent over straight away.’ 104 Lady Wang merely smiled and nodded her head without saying anything. (Hawkes: 92-3) (2) Yangs (1978:40) Meanwhile refreshments had been served. And as Hsi-feng handed round the tea and sweetmeats, Lady Wang asked whether she had distributed the monthly allowance. “It’s finished,” was Hsi-feng’s answer. “Just now I took some people to the upstairs storeroom at the back to look for some brocade. But though we searched for a long time we couldn’t find any of the sort you described to us yesterday, madam. Could your memory have played you a trick?” “It doesn’t matter if there’s none of that sort,” said Lady Wang. “Just choose two lengths to make your little cousin some clothes. This evening don’t forget to send for them.” “I’ve already done that,” replied Hsi-feng. “Knowing my cousin would be here any day, I got everything ready. The material’s waiting in your place for your inspection. If you pass it, madam, it can be sent over.” Lady Wang smiled and nodded her approval. (3) Joly: (1892-3:42-3) As she spoke, tea and refreshments had already been served, and Hsi-feng herself handed round the cups and offered the fruits. Upon hearing the question further put by her maternal aunt Secunda, “Whether the issue of the monthly allowances of money had been finished or not yet?” Hsi-feng replied: “The issue of the money has also been completed; but a few moments back, when I went along with several servants to the back upper-loft, in search of the satins, we looked for ever so long, but we saw nothing of the kind of satins alluded to by you, madame, yesterday; so may it not be that your memory misgives you?” “Whether there be any or not, of that special kind, is of no consequence,” observed madame Wang. “You should take out,” she therefore went on to add, “any two pieces which first come under your hand, for this cousin of yours to make herself dresses with; and in the evening, if I don’t forget, I’ll send some one to fetch them.” “I’ve in fact already made every provision,” rejoined Hsi-feng; “knowing very well that my cousin would be arriving within these two days, I have had everything got ready for her. And when you, madame, go back, if you will pass an eye over everything, I shall be able to send them round.” Madame Wang gave a smile, nodded her head assentingly, but uttered not a word by way of reply. While the translators are trying to retain some of the proper social respect Xifeng holds for her addressee by the addition of two post vocatives madam, their renderings still read like English mode of expression since the ST title 太太, apart from its social function, performs grammatical function as well. This is the Chinese phenomenon whereby “designatives, or mentioning terms [are used] as part of connected discourse in speaking of persons” (Chao, 105 1956:217). In the translation, syntactic fluency and prominence are realised by means of the pronominals you and your, which is a primary consideration Venuti identifies with domesticating. As a result, the conspicuous social respect shown by the repeated use of a title falls into the shade, becoming instead something of a second- or after-thought. As can be imagined, a great deal of the C-value of the ST title as both term of courtesy and syntactic component is lost in the English pronouns. As for the rendition your mother for Xifeng’s reference to Lady Wang when speaking to Baoyu at the end of Chapter 7, it seems well-contextualised not only for a scene as private as between Xifeng and her double cousin Baoyu. It could also be considered a marvellous touch added to the ST author’s description of Xifeng’s colourful characters as being cunning, manipulative, greedy, deceitful and power-hungry. The prelude to this reference is like this. After Baoyu and Xifeng have met Qin Zhong, Keqing’s younger brother, had dinner and played at the Ning-guo Mansion, the chief steward of the house orders Jiao Da, a senior servant of the house, to send Qin Zhong home. Jiao Da is irritated at being given such an errand at a dark midnight. Counting on his seniority, he shouts abuses at the chief steward, and even at his young master Jia Rong when the latter tries to put him under control. Jiao Da then cries out allegations of incestuous adultery within the Jia House, which insinuates Jia Zhen’s affair with Keqing and Xifeng’s with Jia Rong respectively. The metaphorical nature of the Chinese terms for different types of incest Jiao Da uses, i.e., 爬灰 (“scratching in the ashes” or a father-in-law having an affair with his daughter-in-law), and 养小叔子 (“feeding a younger uncle” or a sister-in-law’s affair with her husband’s brother), is beyond Baoyu, who promptly asks Xifeng sitting beside him in a carriage: 106 Eg.2: ORIGINAL: ……宝玉在车上听见，因问凤姐道：“姐姐，你听他说 ‘爬灰的爬灰’，什么是‘爬灰’？” 凤姐听了，连忙立眉嗔 目断喝道： “少胡说！那是醉汉嘴里混吣，你是什么样的人，不说没听见，还倒细问！等我回去回了太太，仔细捶你不 捶你！ ” 唬的宝玉忙央告道： “好姐姐，我再不敢了。 ” (曹雪芹and高鹗, 1982:119-120) TRANSLATIONS: (1) Hawkes (1973:183) …Bao-yu, sitting in the carriage with Xi-feng, was less inhibited. ‘Feng, what did he mean when he said “Father-in-law pokes in the ashes”?’ ‘Hold your tongue!’ Xi-feng snapped back at him, livid. ‘It’s bad enough for a person in your position to even listen to such drunken filth, but to go asking questions about it, really! Just wait till I tell your mother! You’re going to get the biggest hiding you’ve ever had in your life!’ Terrified by her vehemence, Bao-yu implored forgiveness. ‘Please, Feng, don’t tell her! I promise never to say those words again.’ (2) Yangs (1978:116) …whereas Baoyu in the carriage was rather entertained by this drunken outburst. “Did you hear that, sister?” he asked. “What’s meant by ‘scratching in the ashes’?” “Don’t talk nonsense,” snapped Hsi-feng, glowering. “What’s come over you? You not only listen to drunken raving but have to ask questions too. Just wait until we get back and I tell your mother – you’ll pay for this with a thrashing.” “Dear sister,” apologized Pao-yu fearfully, “I promise not to do it again.” (3) Joly (1892-3:120) …but Pao-yü, seated in the carriage as he was, also caught this extravagant talk and inquired of lady Feng: “Sister, did you hear him say something about ‘scraping of the ashes?’ What’s it?” “Don’t talk such rubbish!” hastily shouted lady Feng; “it was the maudlin talk of a drunkard! A nice boy you are! not to speak of your listening, but you must also inquire! wait and I’ll tell your mother and we’ll see if she doesn’t seriously take you to task.” Pao-yü was in such a state of fright that he speedily entreated her to forgive him. “My dear sister,” he craved, “I won’t venture again to say anything of the kind” (4) Wang (1958:63) …Phoenix…pretended not to hear, but Pao-yu asked innocently what the old servant meant by some of the things he said. “Don’t you dare repeat the words of a drunken man!” Phoenix said to him in a stern tone. “I shall tell Tai-tai if you ever mention it again to anyone.” Pao-yu was frightened, for phoenix had never spoken to him like that before. He pleaded, “I won’t say it again, ever! Please don’t tell Tai-tai.” (5) McHugh (1958:57) …But Pao Yu, in his innocence, could not refrain from asking Madame Phoenix during the journey in the carriage: “Sister, what did he mean by the expression ‘scratching in the ashes’?” Violently angry, which was quite unusual for her, she rebuked him; “Do not ask stupid questions! You 107 not only listen to the foolish chatter of a drunkard, but have to ask questions about it! Just wait until I tell your grandmother! You will pay for this with a thrashing!” “Ah, dear big sister, please do not tell on me! I certainly will not ask such a stupid question again,” pleaded the frightened Pao Yu. Indeed, he would not have asked if he had known that the expression ‘to scratch in the ashes’ referred to illicit association between a father-in-law and a daughter-in-law. Formwise, Yangs’ translation of the title 太太 into a kinship term loses some of the rigorous respect required of Xifeng at that time and the value of social stratification associated with it. Functionally however, it may contribute to the portrayal of her as a cunning and manipulative character in the translated work. On the one hand, the rendition your mother serves to draw Baoyu to her closer as intimate allies not only by marriage but also by blood. On the other hand, it also functions as a reference of threat to intimidate Baoyu from ruminating over Jiao Da’s obscure slang any longer. Xifeng’s words in Eg.3 below following Baoyu’s apology and promise support these two justifications. Besides, Yangs’s exploitation of a kinship term reciprocates Baoyu’s address to her as 姐姐 “(elder) sister”. Contextually, it also corresponds perfectly to Yangs’ addition of what is presumed to be Xifeng’s intimate address to Baoyu, i.e., the “brother”. Therefore, Yangs’ domestication here “kills two birds with one stone”. Eg.3: ORIGINAL: …..凤姐道: “这才是呢。等到了家，咱们回了老太太，打发你同你秦家侄儿学里念书去要紧。” 说着，却自回往荣府 而来。(曹雪芹 and 高鹗, 1982:120) TRANSLASTIONS: (1) Hawkes (1973:184) ‘That’s my good little cuzzy! When we get back I must tell Grandma to make them explain to the school about Qin Zhong and arrange for him to be admitted soon.’ As they talked, the carriage bore them back into Rong-guo House. (2) Yang (1978:116) 108 “That’s more like it, brother. The important thing, once we’re home, is to talk to the old lady about sending you and your nephew Chin Chung [Qin Zhong] to school.” They were back now in the Jung [Rong-guo] Mansion… (Yangs, 1978:116) (3) Joly (1892-3:120) “My dear brother, if that be so, it’s all right!” rejoined lady Feng reassuringly; “on our return we’ll speak to her venerable ladyship and ask her to send some one to arrange matters in the family school, and invite Ch’in Chung to come to school for his studies.” While yet this conversation was going on, they arrived at the Jung Mansion. (4) McHugh (1958:57-8): “Very well, dear child,” said Madame Phoenix, quickly appeased. “And when we are home I shall speak to Grandmother and ask her for your sake to help to have your nephew Chin Chung admitted to your school.” 3.1.2.3 Joly’s 太太 Turning to Joly’s renditions (see Table 3.4 above), three things can be easily found. First, no valueless second-person pronoun you is used alone. Instead, all the four instances of you are accompanied by the respectful term of address madame, two of which occur in Xifeng’s conversation to Lady Wang as illustrated in the ST in Eg.1 above and 5 below. While Joly’s configuration of you followed by madame indicates an English mode of expression, it does represent some of the manner of speech between two social unequals. As for the C-values of madame, they will be calculated shortly. Second, kinship terms are sparingly used. The two instances of your mother are supposedly from the mouths of Xifeng and Nannie Li respectively as illustrated in Eg.2 above and Eg.4 below. These choices seem to suggest some common translational behaviour (or normative choice) on the part of the three translators discussed so far. That is, when the translators intended to represent a clearer picture of the interpersonal relationship between the 109 persons involved in the titles used, what first occurs to the translators seems to be a domesticating rendering, i.e., to render titles into kinship terms. This accounts for Hawkes, Joly and Yangs’ convergence on the two instances in question. Eg. 4 ORIGINAL: 宝玉笑央道: “妈妈，我只喝一钟。” 李嬷嬷道: “不中用！当着老太太、太太，那怕你吃一坛呢。…” (曹雪芹and高鹗, 1982:127) TRANSLATIONS: (1) Hawkes (1973:124) ‘Oh go on, Nannie!’ Bao-yu pleaded good-humouredly. ‘I shall only drink one cup.’ ‘It’s no good!’ said Nannie Li. ‘I don’t mind if you drink a hogshead as long as your grandmother or your mother is there…’ (2) Yangs (1978:124) “Just one cup, dear nanny,” begged Baoyu. “No you don’t! If the Lady Dowager or Lady Wang were here I wouldn’t mind your drinking a whole jarful…” (3) Joly (1892-3:127) Pao-yü smilingly pleaded: “My nurse, I’ll take just one cup and no more.” “It’s no use,” nurse Li replied, “were your grandmother and mother present, I wouldn’t care if you drank a whole jar. (4) Wang (1958:67) “Just one cup, “ Pao-yu pleaded. “It won’t do,” Li Ma said. “When you are with Lao Tai-tai and Tai-tai, I don’t care if you drink a whole jug.” (5) McHugh (1958:61) “Just one goblet, “ he begged. “No!” insisted Mother Li severely. “If your mother or grandmother were present you could drink a whole jugful for all I would care.” Thirdly, the majority of Joly’s renditions concentrate on two honorific titles, i.e., madame (including its plural form mesdames) and lady. Specifically, apart from the last five instances 110 of the (two/senior) ladies used as general references as listed in Table 3.4 above, 72% of Joly’s renditions take respectful or official forms. These include four instances of you+madame, seven madame LN, one lady LN, thirteen the/our lady, two her ladyship and one you senior ladies. As such, both lady(ship) and madame can be taken as the normative renditions of Joly for the ST titles in question. While the C-values of lady(ship) have been identified as consisting of non-kin, female and social position, those contained by madame add up to four: non-kin, female, social position and married. This seems to suggest that the use of madame basically represents the formal and respectful address behaviour of the speakers of the ST, which supports our hypothesis about the positive relationship between the C-values of a rendition and its strategy of translation. (Of course, this choice does fail to represent the ST’s index value for the age (i.e. seniority/juniority) factor embodied in the birth-sequence marking prefixes 大 and 二.) This said, we can wrap up our look at Joly’s renditions by concluding that Joly’s renditions confirms our hypothesis that a rendition that represents more of the C-values of its ST term stands closer to its ST in form and function, and that such a rendition suggests a more foreignizing strategy in translation. 3.1.2.4 McHugh and Wang’s 太太 Looking at McHugh and Wang’s treatment of the Chinese title太太and its compounds, it is easy to discern a general tendency for foreignizing; and this is despite the fact that we cannot make a statistics of their renditions of the titles in question just as we have done with the three complete versions. Different from the three complete versions, while Wang supplies renditions that conform to the most foreignizing forms we proposed above, the McHugh 111 sisters provide both the most drastic foreignizing choices and kinship terms. As far as the foreignizing strategy is concerned, both versions render the title using loan technique, that is, the transliterated Tai-tai. The McHugh version even goes so far as to render大太太 (the eldest lady, i.e., Lady Xing) and二太太 (the second (eldest) lady, i.e., Lady Wang) as big Tai tai and second Tai tai respectively. It is evident that such drastic renditions endeavour to represent the complete contents (i.e., the C-values) of their ST counterparts. Eg.5 below illustrates these choices. The only slight difference between the Wang and McHughs’ foreignizations lies in their orthography: italicised Tai tai in the McHughs (as in Eg.5 below), and non-italicised but hyphened “Tai-tai” in Wang (as in Eg.2 and Eg.4 above). While the McHughs never employ any footnote for their transliterated terms (though it is another matter whether the reader can make sense of these loan terms), Wang gives literal explanations to most of his transliterations in footnotes5. However, a footnote for his Tai-tai is nowhere to be found in his work. This might be one of the unfortunate inconsistencies of his work. Valuewise, since the reader could not possibly comprehend the semantics of the drastic renditions, s/he might not be struck by their C-values, which are kept intact, though. As for the McHughs’ use of kinship term for太太, it is an exact reappearance of Hawkes and Yangs’ your mother as in Eg.4. However, the McHugh version somehow mistakes太太as your grandmother in Eg.2. Eg.5 ORIGINAL: 尤氏听了，心中甚喜，因说道：“后日是太爷的寿日，到底怎么办？”贾珍说道：“我方才到了太爷那里去请安， 兼请太爷来家来受一受一家子的礼。太爷因说道： ‘我是清净惯了的，我不愿意往你们那是非场中去闹去……”尤氏 因叫人叫了贾蓉来： “吩咐来升照旧例预备两日的筵席，要丰丰富富的。你再亲自到西府里去请老太太，大太太，二太 太和你琏二婶子来逛逛。……” 5 Arguably, reading the translation of a literary work “with compensatory footnotes and marginal explanations often has a disruptive effect on the ‘punch’ or force of ST message” (Al-Qinai, 2000:499) by impeding or interfering with the reader’s enjoyment of the story. 112 贾蓉一一的答应着出去了。(曹雪芹 and 高鹗, 1982:145) TRANSLATIONS: (1) Hawkes (1973: 222): You-shi was delighted with this news. ‘And what are we going to do about Father’s birthday?’ she asked. ‘It’s the day after tomorrow.’ ‘I’ve just been out to see him,’ said Cousin Zhen, ‘and I took the opportunity while I was there of asking him if he would come over on his birthday to receive everyone’s kowtows, but he refused. He said, “I’ve got used to the peace and quiet of the monastery and I’m not willing to go back into your quarrelsome world again…’ You-shi called in Jia Rong. ‘Tell Lal Sheng to prepare the usual two-day party for Grandfather,’ she said. ‘Say we want a really good spread. We shall be asking Lady Jia and Sir Zheng and Lady Wang and your Auntie Lian from the other house: you can go round yourself to invite them…’ Jia Rong promised to carry out his mother’s instructions and left the room, (2) Yangs (1978: 147-8): Madam You cheered up at this. “And how are we to celebrate your father’s birthday the day after tomorrow?” “I’ve just been to pay my respects to him,” answered Jia Zhen. “I invited him here to receive congratulations from the whole family, but he said, ‘I’m used to a peaceful life and don’t want to be disturbed by all the commotion in your house…You can go to the West Mansion to deliver invitations in person to the old lady, Lady Xing, Lady Wang and Xifeng.” …Madam You told Chia Jung what her husband had said. …Her son assented and had just withdrawn... (3) Joly (1892-3: 154-5): Mrs. Yu was very much cheered… “The day after to-morrow,” she felt obliged to add, “is again our senior’s, Mr. Chia Ching’s birthday, and how are we to celebrate it after all?” “I’ve just been over to our Senior’s and paid my respects,” replied Chia Chen, “and further invited the old gentleman to come home, and receive the congratulations of the whole family. “‘I’m accustomed,’ our Senior explained, ‘to peace and quiet, and have no wish to go over to that worldly place of yours…” Mrs. Yu, having asked Chia Jung to come round, told him to direct Lai Sheng to make the usual necessary preparations for a banquet to last for a couple of days, with due regard to a profuse and sumptuous style. “You go by-and-by,” (she advised him), “in person to the Western Mansion and invite dowager lady Chia, mesdames Hsing and Wang, and your sister-in-law Secunda lady Lien to come over for a stroll….” Chia Jung […took] his leave… (4) McHugh (1958: 76-7): The Prince noddedly thoughtfully… “I visited our Elder today in his hermitage out in the mountains and invited him to come here the 113 day after tomorrow to receive birthday congratulations from the whole family,” he reported.“The old gentleman declined with thanks, however. ‘I do not wish to be disturbed in my contemplative peace,’ he said, ‘and I have no desire to return to your world of conflicting opinions…’” The Princess accordingly sent the necessary instructions to the majordomo by her son Chia Yung. Then Chia Yung had to go to the west palace and personally invite the “old Tai Tai” and the “big Tai Tai’ and the “second Tai tia” and sister-in-law Phoenix to the birthday festival. [On the morning of the birthday…the chief guests who were received by Prince and Princess Chen at the entrance to the reception hall…They were Princess Shief, Madame Cheng, and Madame Phoenix with Pao Yu and the others. Only the Princess Ancestress had remained at home.] 3.1.2.5 Renditions of 太太: Conclusion The five translators’ renditions of the title 太太 and its derivatives register observable demarcation along the lines of Venuti’s distinction between domestication and foreignisation. On the extreme end of foreignisation we located both McHugh and Wang’s abridged versions. As advocated by Venuti, they just loan the titles by means of its pronunciation in the SL. In fact, total foreignisation is realised in this respect because, according to Venuti (1986:190), their renderings can be seen as “a tertium datum,” which not only “‘sound foreign’ to the reader”, but also “resist easy reading according to contemporary standards.” Contrasted with these two foreignisations are the three complete versions which choose to represent the titles in question in forms that look more familiar (intelligible) and read more fluent to the reader. However, these renditions differ from each other in respect of the degree to which they endeavour to retain the semantic and cultural values of the ST titles. Basically, Hawkes seems more domesticated than Yangs and Joly in that he employs fewer formal titles but more pronouns and kinship terms to show his reader a clear relationship between the dyads. Yangs and Joly, on the other hand, appear more foreignized because more than seventy per cent of their choices fall on formal titles. Unlike kinship terms which serve to narrow the social distance between the dyads concerned and reduce the respect of the speakers for the 114 addressees/referents concerned, these titles represent more of the values of their ST counterparts and thus construe the stringent social stratification between the dyads. In passing, the above findings seem in favour of our hypothesis concerning the relation between the amount of C-values contained in a rendition and its position on the F-D continuum. 3.2 老太太 3.2.1 Origin and use According toYuan (1994:163), the Chinese title 老太太 is derived from the term 太太 basing on its meaning for an official’s wife. Since the prefix 老 means “old (age)” and “seniority”, it is natural that the compound came to be used to the mother of an official since the Qing Dynasty. With the popularity of its use, the term was gradually employed to elderly women in general, including the mothers of both the speaker and hearer (A Big Chinese Dictionary, 8:604). In our ST corpus (see Table 3.5 below), the term is exclusively used to refer to Dowager Lady Jia, mother of Jia She and Jia Zheng, and grandmother of Baoyu and Xifeng. This conforms to the original usage of the term, i.e., to the mother of an official. The fact that nearly everyone in the Jia House, masters and servants alike, speak to/of the old lady by the exclusive title implies the Chinese values on the dimensions of social distance, respect and deference, which can be formulated with the other values of the title as: non-kin, female, married, social position, and senior age. Note that this “venerable lady” (see Joly below) holds a two-fold status, too. On the one hand, she is the widow of a hereditary Duke. On the other hand, she is the mother of a peerage and official. For this double status, “Dutchess” and “The Dowager Dutchess” seem to be the 115 correct English social manner of address to her, just as “Your Grace” is appropriate as the employee manner of address to her, too (Beyfus, 1992:318). Of course, these are just a “standard” type of assumptions for a domesticated treatment of the title based on a universalistic stance of the peerage system in both cultures. A tempting literal and thus foreignizing type of assumptions for the ST title seems to be “your old ladyship” and “her old ladyship/the old lady” as address and reference respectively. These however seem to be the false friends of the ST title. This is because, although the ST prefix 老 and its English counterpart “old” correspond to each other semantically, they differ in their pragmatic or cultural implications. Pragmatically, 老“old”, apart from denoting old age, connotes rich knowledge and experience as well as senior status in society, and thus respect. The extensive use of this prefix in many vocatives and honorifics speaks volumes for this cultural implication. While one case in point is its prefixing to 先生 “early born”, and 兄 “elder brother” to form honorific expressions, as will be discussed in Chapter 5 below, another is its compounding with monosyllabic surnames to address an old friend in an informal way, such as 老王 “Old man Wang”, 老刘 “Old man Liu”, etc. (Chao, 1956:221) In English however, “old” refers more to the biological life of men, animals and plants, meaning “having lived or existed a relatively long time” or “advanced in years or life” (OED online). While “an old girl” can be used in English “colloq[uially] to a woman at any time of life, either disrespectfully or (occas[ionally]) as an endearing term of address, espec[ially] one's mother or wife” (ibid), “an old man/woman” refers just to a man/woman advanced in years (ibid). No social respect whatever is embodied in the usage. Justification can also be found in people’s attitude to age in Chinese and western cultures. Where age is an open topic in 116 Chinese, it is viewed as a taboo in the west. From these comparisons we seen justified in saying that the seemingly “faithful” rendering of 老太太 by means of “your/her old ladyship” and “the old lady” would fall prey to a cultural trap here. This is so because the C-values of seniority and respect can hardly be conjured up in English. Apart from the above possible renditions, the translators might come up with other solutions, all of which might line up on the F-D continuum as: Lao Tai tai, (your/her old lady(ship)/the old lady(ship), Old Lady Jia, your/her/the venerable lady(ship), the (Dowager) Dutchess, Dowager Lady Jia/the Dowager Lady, Lady Jia, (your) grandmother, grandma, you/she/her. Table 3.5 below shows that, except for Xifeng and Baoyu who are the apples of the Dowager Lady’s eye, all the other people use the title for the purpose of reference, which amounts to 89% of the total occurrences of the title in our data. Like the use of other titles, this again indicates the stringent requirement for social stratification in addressing or mentioning people, especially those with good social position, in feudal Chinese societies. In fact, throughout the whole story, only two types of people address the Dowager Lady by other terms. One consists of Xifeng and Baoyu who tend to use the intimate kinship term 老祖宗 “Old Ancestress”. And the other person who violates the social principle of address is her son Jia Zheng who calls her 母亲 “Mother” four times (Sun, 1991:206). 3.2.2 Renditions of 老太太 3.2.2.1 Hawkes’s 老太太 Looking at Hawkes’s renditions for 老太太 (see Table 3.5 below and Eg.3, 4 and 5 117 above), the same story as that in his renderings for 太太 can be found. On the one hand, Hawkes ranges his twenty-seven renditions among two main categories of terms: (1) thirteen (48%) official titles, including Lady+LN, and Her (Old) Ladyship, (2) eleven (41%) kinship terms such as the formal Grandmother+LN, the surnameless Grandmother and Grandma, and the general your/her grandmother. If we add the three pronouns he uses, i.e., two instances of you and one her, to the kinship terms, 52% of Hawkes’s renditions conform to the domesticating options we supplied. Like his kinship renditions for 太太, Hawkes’s variations of “grandmother” also entail delicate differentiation of formality/intimacy in scales. Given “grandmother” as the neutral root term, “Grandma” can be seen as one degree more intimate while Grandmother+LN one degree more formal. Note that the delicacy of Grandmother+ LN should not be held in contrast with either Lady+LN or her/your Ladyship. This is because the replacement of the ST title by menas of kinship terms itself downplays the canonicity of the Chinese address behaviour. In other words, whereas formality in the ST is implied as a matter of course, it is substituted as a matter of choice – first, bewteen titles and kinship terms, and second, betwen impersonal and intimate kinship terms. As a consequence, whatever formality is connoted in a neutral (i.e., grandmother in this case) or more “formal” kinship term (i.e., Grandmother+LN in this case), it is not absolute, but relative to the variations themselves. Also note that the term “grandmother” premises, in both Chinese and British culures, on the (conventional) semantic values of being married and old enough to have a grandchild. With this in mind, we can proceed to spell out and compare the C-values of Hawkes’s kinship terms as follows: 118 Table 3.5: Renditions of 老太太 in Hawkes, Yangs and Joly Chinese Usage English Translation Dyad Amount Hawkes Yangs Xifeng, Baoyu – Dowager Lady Jia 3 you 2; Grandma you 2; our old lady your venerable ladyship 2 Xifeng, Baoyu – other masters 7 Grandma 3; Grandmother 3; the old lady 6; she her/our venerable ladyship 3 ; our dowager Grandmother Jia Senior masters – their juniors 3 Joly lady 2; our old lady Lady Jia; your/her grandmother 2 the old lady 3 our venerable ladyship (her grandmother); dowager lady Chia; our old lady Junior masters – their seniors 4 Lady Jia 3; her the old lady; the Lady Dowager 2 our venerable lady; our dowager lady; her ladyship; our old lady Masters – servants 2 Lady Jia 2 the old lady 2 Old Lady Chia; the old lady Servants – masters 6 Lady Jia 4; Her Ladyship; your grandmother the old lady 3; the Lady Dowager 3 her venerable ladyship 4; our old lady; your grandmother Between servants Total 3 28 Her Old Ladyship 2 the old lady 3 27 her/our venerable lady 3 27 26 119 a. your/her grandmother: kin, female, old, married, neutral formality b. Grandma: kin, female, old, married, most intimate c. Grandmother LN: kin, female, old, married, most formal On the other hand, Hawkes’s kinship system can be broken down into several rules even sub-rules of choice based on Who-is-speaking-to-whom. To begin with, use of the surnameless intimate kinship term Grandmother becomes the privilege of three people, i.e., Xifeng, Baoyu and Keqing. Even here a further classification of speakers seems to be in operation. For instance, when Baoyu speaks to the old lady, only the pronominal you becomes Hawkes’s choice, which helps to give the reader a glimpse of the intimate and causal relation he enjoys with her. The same is true of Xifeng’s and Keqing’s references to the old lady. In Hawkes’s hands, the kinship term Grandmother becomes the norm rather than the exception. But when it comes for them to speak to each other, to Baoyu or to the old lady in face, Grandma is manoeuvred to show intimacy between both dyads, at least in Hawkes’s hand. Eg.3 above is a case in point. This can be seen as a typical way of domestication in that the cold or distant social relationship between the dyads exhibited by the ST title (i.e., the values of non-kin, low familiarity, formal and public manner of speech) is domesticated into warm or intimate familial relationship. Second, the general kinship term grandmother prefixed with determiners your and her pertains to some senior masters and their senior servants. This accounts for the use of your/her grandmother by Lady Wang, Nannie Li and one of Lady Wang’s maids, mainly to Baoyu (as in Eg. 4 above). And thirdly, all other people, masters and servants included, are made to show their proper respect to the old lady by using the 120 titles Lady LN and Her Ladyship, which is easily intelligible to the English reader. While the first two measures result in typical domesticating productions, some of the values revealed by these kinship terms are already different from those contained in the ST title. If the Chinese term reflects strict social stratification and distance between the dyads and between the speakers and the referents, these kinship terms are associated with close, even affectionate kindred relations between them. As a result, the social values behind these renditions run contrary to those embedded in the ST term. With regard to Hawkes’s third measure, i.e., the adoption Lady+LN and your/her Ladyship, two things deserve mentioning. First, such formal expressions contain the three most important C-values of 老太太: i.e., non-kin, social position, and formality. Compared with you/she and grandmother, Lady+LN and your/her Ladyship fare nearer to the foreignizing end of the F-D continuum. However, these “official” titles present a dilemma here. On the one hand, they do not appear, to the English reader, to be actually “correct” English ways of address to such a lady, which, as analyzed above, should be “The Dowager Dutchess” or “Your Grace”. On the other hand, they downgrade the Dowager Lady to the status of her two daughters-in-law who are also “titled” Lady+LN and the like. Consequently, the conspicuous and rigorous social stratification between the two generations of ladies (mother-in-law vis-à-vis daughter-in-law) becomes obscured. Besides, the addition of the lady’s own surname Jia (as in Eg.5 above) does not conform to the standard 121 English mode of expression either, let alone the fact that it also constitutes a betrayal of the way whereby the ST title is configured. 3.2.2.2 Yangs’老太太 Eg. 3, 4 and 5 offer a glimpse of Yangs’ understanding and treatment of the Chinese title 老太太. Compared with Hawkes’s conspicuous domesticating tendency in dealing with the title, Yangs’ handling of it reveals two features. First, their choices indicate the translators’ voluntary attempt for a seeming literal representation of the usage of the title in the ST. Table 3.5 above provides a full story in this respect. It shows that the translators render twenty-seven of the ST title by means of what looks like equivalent English titles. Unlike Hawkes and Joly, they do not use any kinship terms. Apart from three pronouns (i.e., you and she), 89% of their renditions falls on two specious types of titles, i.e., the old lady (as in Eg.3 and 5) and the Lady Dowager (as in Eg.4). What this means is that almost all Yangs’ characters speak to and of the old lady with one title or the other, thus showing their proper deference to and distance from her. If we take these renditions at a superficial level without dwelling into their pragmatic or cultural implications, this formal feature seems to go in line with our hypothesis of associating more renditions in the form of titles with a more foreignizing translation strategy. The second feature of Yangs’ renditions comes as a logical consequence of the first. Note that in their foreignizing attempt to render the title into the old lady (amounting to 70% of the total), Yangs seem to forget the fact that this term constitutes “a false 122 friend” of the Chinese epithet 老 (Liu, 2003c:178), and connotes no commendatory implications or the respect of its Chinese counterpart. As pointed out above, here lies the deep-rooted cultural difference between English and Chinese cultures in terms of old age. Also note that Yangs’ invention “the Lady Dowager” is problematic as well. 3.2.2.3 Joly’s 老太太 Compared with Hawkes and Yangs’ renderings of the title 老太太, Joly’s (see Table 3.5 and Eg. 3, 4 and 5 above) reveal more differences than similarities. As far as their similarities are concerned, Joly and Hawkes’s renditions register two common points: i.e., their choices of her ladyship (one occurrence in both translations) and your/her grandmother (three in Hawkes and two in Joly). As for Joly and Yangs’ renditions, one similarity stands out, and this consists in their choices of the/our old lady: nineteen instances in Yangs compared with six in Joly. Since the damaging effect of this seemingly congruent rendering has been discussed above, we just focus on the differences Joly’s renditions demonstrate. Though Joly ranges his renditions within nine different variations of three sets of address terms, this does not mean that his production ranks him above Hawkes as more domesticating. This is because a great majority (69%) of his choices falls on two sets of social status terms, namely fourteen instances of venerable lady/ship (as in Eg.3 above) and four dowager lady (as in Eg.5 above). Since these are his normative choices for the ST title, their C-values need to be spelt out before we proceed with our analysis. Note that since venerable has the commendatory meaning of an old person 123 “considered to deserve great respect or honour because of character, religious or historical importance” (OED online), the values of social position and old age can be assumed as co-current with it. However, the marital status of the referent thus signified is ambiguous. Therefore, with formality taken granted as constant, venerable lady/ship comes with C-values of non-kin, female, social position, and old age. Though the translator makes sedulous attention and consistency not to capitalise these honorific terms, as he does with many other terms, his attempt for the closest English counterpart cannot be neglected. Given that this “official” title represents most of the ST’s C-values, Joly could be rated the as having achieved the highest foreignisation in this respect, with the highest cultural appropriateness at that. The addition of the modifier venerable prefixing lady and ladyship speaks volumes for this. In contrast with the derogatory epithet old preceding lady as in Yangs and some of Joly’s own productions, venerable conveys more of the communicative and social implications of its Chinese counterpart 老 while concealing its sensitive element of old age. 3.2.2.4 McHugh and Wang’s 老太太 Turing to McHugh and Wang, only three things needed to be said about their treatment of the title 老太太. First, like their renderings of 太太 above, 老太太 is all transliterated in Wang but mostly transliterated in McHugh. Given the conclusion drawn above for this measure, their treatment constitutes a consistent practice of foreignisation. It follows that the C-values of 老太太 are “carried over” intact in this unpacked transference, though it is another matter whether they are within the reach 124 of the TT reader. Second, despite the fact that both translators base their renditions of the title on the transliteration of 太太, they render the compound 老太太 in different techniques. In McHugh, it is a semantic rendering of the determiner 老 and a transliteration of the head title, resulting in the old Tai tai (as in Eg.5 above). In Wang, it is a complete transliteration with two initial letters capitalised, i.e., “Lao Tai-tai” as shown in Eg.4 above. On its first occurrence, the exotic term is introduced by a footnote reading “Honorific designation for the mother of the master of the house” (Wang, 1958:28). Like their treatment of 太太 , McHugh and Wang’s whole-sale rendering here is intended to show clearly how the Chinese people of various social statuses address or talk about Dowager Lady Jia in a unanimous manner. At the same time, these renditions represent the solemn social respect the addressee/referent enjoys, even among the family members. However, McHugh’s replacement of 老 by“old” violates the implicit English refrain from adopting it as an epithet for address. And thirdly, the McHugh sisters are now moving a little bit towards the domesticating strategy. As shown in Eg.3 and 4 above, they render some of the titles into the kinship term Grandmother and your grandmother. This is noteworthy in that the translators seem to be following exactly Hawkes rule of Who-is-speaking-to-whom-about-whom. This is especially true of the case of the more intimate Grandmother in Eg.3. 3.2.2.5 Renditions of 老太太: Conclusion The five translators’ treatment of the title 老太太 almost repeats the same pattern as that of their renditions of 太太, which thus reinforces our hypothesis about the 125 relationship between the C-values of a rendering and the strategy used in producing it. While the translators are pursuing their respective strategies, two slight differences are discernable. As far as the three complete versions are concerned, Hawkes is domesticating more of his renditions while Yangs and Joly are foreignizing more. With respect to the two abridged versions, Wang is carrying on his foreignisation to the extreme while the McHugh are doing it with some semantic reserve for domesticating choices. Of course, it remains to be seen whether these differences will foretell some stereotypical tendency in the strategies adopted by the translators. 3.3 奶奶 and 姑娘 奶奶 “young wife” and 姑娘 “young girl” are titles designating the social statuses of junior mistresses in the novel, which respectively rank as the second (thirty-four instances) and third (thirty-one instances) most frequently used titles in our data. These two titles are discussed side by side with each other, not only because they concern the most active cohort of characters in the story. It is mainly due to the fact that their English renditions each reveal smaller ranges of variation. In the data, 奶奶 is used to designates two types of ladies: junior masters’ wives and Mrs Xue. Our interest here is primarily in the first use, since the second registers only one occurrence. The title 姑娘 on the other hand is basically used to refer to the girls of the Jia family and Daiyu and Baochai. But it is also used to refer to Jia Lian’s wife Xifeng (as in Table 3.9 below). 126 3.3.1 奶奶 Table 3.6 below indicates that of the several junior Jia daughters-in-law (including the remote Mrs Huang), the colourful character Xifeng receives the most instances of addresses and references by this title: nine and ten respectively. This can be seen as an index to her power and influence in the big Jia House: some people are fond of her, others hold her in awe, and still others flatter her. Our focus is here on how the title 奶奶 is represented in the five English translations. Note how complicated or confusing the use of 奶奶 is in the ST. On the one hand, two generations of ladies share the title. On the other hand, both husband’s personal names and order of birth are prefixed to the title. As far as the patriarchal generations of the Jias are concerned, the senior generation includes wives of masters who have in their personal names the common radical 王 “wang” as indicator of their generation. Therefore we have three gentlemen from the two branches of the Jia House, i.e., Jia Zhen (贾珍) who is now in charge of the east (Ning-guo) mansion, and Jia She’s son Jia Lian (贾琏) and Jia Zheng’s son Baoyu from the west mansion. Apart from them, there are Jia Rui (贾瑞), the orphan grandson of the remote Jia Dairu, and Jia Huang (贾璜), who lives near the Jia House as a remote descendant. Except Baoyu and Jia Rui are bachelors, the other three gentlemen are all married and their wives are thus spoken to/of as 奶奶, i.e., Jia Zhen’s wife 珍大奶奶, Jia Lian’s wife 琏二奶奶, and Jia Huang’s wife 璜大奶奶. The title 奶奶 is appropriate for them in that “[f]or a young couple whose father is still active, the terms [used to address them] are shaw.ye [sic] 127 ‘young squire’ and shawnae.nae [sic] ‘young wife’” respecyively (Chao, 1956:225). Here, the prefix shao(少) “young” is dropped, leaving only ye (爷)and nai nai (奶奶). Note that there is another lady sharing this title but one generation junior to the above ladies in our data. It is Qin Keqing, Jia Rong’s wife and Jia Zhen/Mrs You’s daughter-in-law, i.e., 蓉大奶奶. While this means that both her mother-in-law (i.e., Mrs You or 珍大奶奶 in the ST) are talked to/of by the same title, there is a feasible explanation for this “confusion”, which also conforms Chao’s assertion above: Whereas Mrs You deserves the title from the point of view of the two Jia branches as a whole, which runs in contrast in seniority to 老太太 (i.e., “the Dowager Lady Jia”) and 太太 (i.e., Lady Xing and Lady Wang), Keqing enjoys the title because of her status in the east branch where her father-in-law Jia Zhen is the head. Patriarchal generation apart, the relative age or order of birth of the ladies’ husbands constitutes another factor for the complication of the title. In cases where several such young wives are present and/or referred to, especially when they all live together in a big compound, distinction is made in two ways. The formal way is in line with the way whereby Lady Xing and Lady Wang are distinguished in Chinese, i.e., to add prefixes 大 “eldest” or “big”, 二 “second (eldest)” and 三 “third (eldest)”, etc. to the titles (爷 and 奶奶) in accordance with the order of birth of the men pertaining to the same position in the family hierarchy. The other way of distinction is to prefix the man’s personal name to 爷 and 奶奶. 128 Table 3.6: Use of Usage (琏二)奶奶 珍大奶奶 奶奶 of in the corpus Dyad Mode Servants – Xifeng Address Between servants Reference Referent Wang Xifeng Amount 9 10 Master – servants 1 Reference Jia Huang wife – Widow Jin Jia Zhen wife Mrs You 1 你们奶奶 Xifeng – Mrs You’s maid 1 我们奶奶 Mrs You’s maid – Xifeng 1 璜大奶奶 (蓉)大奶奶 Jia Zhen – Huang wife Address Servant – masters Reference 1 Jia Huang wife 1 Between servants 1 Huang wife – Mrs You 2 Reference Dr. Zhang – Keqing’s maid Jia Rong wife Keqing Between servants 3 1 奶 奶 Maid – Mrs Xue Address Mrs Xue 1 奶 奶 Mrs Zhou – Granny Liu Reference Junior Jia wives 1 Total 34 Sometimes, however, both ways are used together, especially when more than one 大奶奶 “big/eldest young wife” from more than one family branch comes together. For instance, Jia Zhen’s wife ranks the eldest of the junior mistresses in the whole Jia House and thus deserves the compound title (珍)大奶奶. However, in the west branch, i.e., the Rong-guo Mansion, there are two 奶 奶 too: Jia Zheng’s widowed daughter-in-law Li Wan, and Xifeng, wife of Jia She’s son Jia Lian. From the branch’s perspective, they are entitled to 大奶奶 and 二奶奶 respectively. Besides, the wife of Jia Huang is also the eldest in her husband’s branch. With these orderings, we therefore have the ad hoc title 奶奶 on the one hand, and more compound titles on the other hand, including 珍大奶奶, 璜大奶奶 and 琏二奶奶. This background information thus enable us to spell out the C-values of the general title 奶奶: non-kin, female, married, junior in age (as compared with 太太), social position and formal. 129 Note that the personal names of the ladies’ husbands in the compound titles are merely used to distinguish the referents rather than endow the compound titles with any particular value different from each other. Besides, the prefixes 大 and 二 do not attribute the titles any more C-values than the juniority variable in age. Therefore, the C-values of the general title can also apply to the compounds of 珍大奶奶, 璜大奶奶, 琏二奶奶 and 蓉大奶奶. However, it does not follow that a translator would not make use of the husbands’ personal names to distinguish one referent from another in their renditions, which, based upon our observations of the renditions of previous titles, might include: Nai-nai, Mrs +FN, Madam/Lady FN, FN’s wife, (your/our) mistress, you/she. 3.3.1.1 Hawkes’s 奶奶 Hawkes’s renditions of 奶奶 (see Table 3.7 below) reveal two obvious features. First, domesticating registers the dominant strategy. This is because the courtesy titles he offers, i.e., Mrs+FN and madam, amounts to only eleven instances, or 31% of the total. Second, his renditions see the most variations this time round. While the use of pronouns (23%) and kinship terms (11%) is his characteristic measure for domesticating, he employs eleven (31%) of his choices as general reference rather than specific ones. Specifically, such references are: our/your mistress, the (young) mistress. Understandably, while both the pronouns and general references dilute the stringent respect contained in the ST titles in question, the general references have only contingent values in the TT. 130 Since the pros and cons of the use of kinship terms and pronouns instead of a title have been discussed above, we just focus on Hawkes’s use of titles. In this respect, his Mrs+FN and mistress constitute his normative choices. According to OED (online), Mrs as a title of courtesy is only “prefixed to the surname of a married woman having no higher or professional title”. Given the fact that both Jia Zhen and Jia Lian hold upper-intermediate official titles, the use of Mrs does not seem adequate in representing the value of social position contained in the ST title for their wives. However, other values being equal, Mrs does apply for the wives of Jia Rong and Jia Huang who are more ordinary Jias. As far as mistress is concerned, it usually refers to “a woman who has power, authority, or ownership as the female head of a family or household” (Webster, 1986:1446). In this sense, the title seems suitable for Jia Zhen’s wife Mrs You and Jia Lian’s wife Xifeng since they both have authority in their respective households. However, here lies an interesting dilemma: in the actual social manner of address, mistress is abbreviated as Mrs+(husband’s) LN, and replaced by madam or ma’am in face-to-face interaction. This conversely justifies Hawkes’s use of Mrs. Note that there is a crucial difference between the standard British (and American as well) configuration and that of Hawkes: it is the husband’s first rather than last name that is adopted in the renditions. 131 Table 3.7: Renditions of 奶奶 in Hawkes, Yangs and Joly Chinese Usage Dyad (琏二) Servants – Xifeng English Mode Address Referent Wang Xifeng Amount 9 Hawkes Mrs Lian 2; ma’am; you 6; your Yangs you, madam 2; madam 3; you 4 奶奶 Joly your ladyship 2; my/our lady 3; you, lady Secunda 3; you Between servants Reference 10 Master Lain’s wife; the young Madam Lien 2; Madam Hsi-feng; lady Feng; lady Secunda 6; our mistress 5; Mrs Lian 3; she our/your/the (second ) mistress 4 ; lady 2 the second master’s wife; she 2 珍大奶奶 Master – servants Jia Huang wife – Widow Jin 你们奶奶 我们奶奶 璜大奶奶 Xifeng – Mrs You’s maid Reference 1 Mrs Zhen Madam Yu Mrs Yu Jia Zhen wife 1 Mrs Zhen Madam Yu lady Yu (Mrs You) 1 your mistress your mistress your mistress 1 our mistress our mistress our mistress 1 Cousin Huang’s wife Mrs Huang Mrs Huang 1 Mrs Huang Mrs Chia Huang Mrs Huang 1 your Auntie Huang Mrs Chia Huang Mrs Huang 2 Qin Shi Madam Jung; she Mrs Ch’in Jia Rong wife 3 your mistress 3 your lady 3 your lady 3 (Qin Keqing) 1 Master Rong’s wife 2 Master Jung’s wife 2 lady Jung Mrs You’s maid – Xifeng Jia Zhen – Huang wife Address Servant – masters Reference Between servants Address (蓉)大 Huang wife – Mrs You 奶奶 Dr. Zhang – Keqing’s maid Reference Between servants Jia Huang wife 奶 奶 Maid – Mrs Xue Address Mrs Xue 1 you, madam madam my lady 奶 奶 Mrs Zhou – Granny Liu Reference Junior Jia wives 1 young mistresses included in “the ladies” young married ladies Total 34 35 36 32 132 However, Hawkes’s replacement of the title 琏二奶奶 with regard to Xifeng in terms of Mrs Lian seems to downgrade her social status to as low as Lady Wang’s dowry-woman (陪房) (or “waiting woman” as Joly renders it) Mrs Zhou who is also given the title Mrs by Hawkes. Given Jia Lian’s position not only as the elder son of a hereditary peerage but also as an official, Beyfus’s (1992:318) title for the lowest peerage’s spouse “Lady+husband’s FN” might be applied to Xifeng. 3.3.1.2 Yangs and Joly’s 奶奶 The foreignizing tendency of Yangs and Joly’s translations of the term 奶奶 and its compounds (see Table 3.7 above) lies in their endeavour to use as many formal titles as possible. This is especially identifiable in their renditions of the servants’ addresses to Xifeng. Compared with the ST’s nine cases, Yangs’ five instances of madam, either used individually or following you, achieve a rather high (55%) foreignisation. This success can be justified from two perspectives. First, it is relatively harder to render addresses by title in face-to-face communication situations. Second, it has been established above that madam is a proper form of address by servants in speaking to their mistress. Joly, however, overdoes Yangs in this aspect, realising eight (89%) foreignizing transfers. He even manages to use more formal titles, such as lady Secunda, my lady, your ladyship. Given that lady was above established as the most appropriate title for Xifeng, his production conforms to the established British way of address. All together, Joly employs twenty-three (or 72%) instances of titles of courtesy to deal with the ST 133 titles, far outnumbering Yangs’ fifteen (42%) and Hawkes’ eleven (31%). Apart from the aforementioned difference in the degree of formal foreignisation, Yangs and Joly differ primarily in the way whereby titles are configured. Yangs try to distinguish between the genuine Jia mistresses from the remote one (i.e., Mrs Huang) by means of the titles Madam and Mrs. Therefore, we see Mrs Huang singled out from the Madams of the prestigious Jia family. For Hawkes and Joly, no such distinction is made: the unanimous Mrs for all ladies in the former, and the interchangeable confusion between lady and Mrs in the latter. Interestingly, Yangs and Joly share another similarity here: they do not keep consistency in attributing personal names to their characters. In Yangs, it is the confusion between Madame Lien and Madam Hsi-feng for Jia Lian’s wife Xifeng, i.e., the ST 琏二奶奶. In Joly, it is between lady Jung and Mrs Ch’in for Jia Rong’s wife Keqing, i.e., the ST 蓉大奶奶. The latter of both of their renditions run contrary not only to their respective ST counterparts’ configurations, but also to the English way of address to the wife of the elder son of a peerage as high as Duke (i.e., Xifeng), or as low as Baronet or Knight (i.e., Keqing). If Beyfus’s (1992:318) guide is something to follow, the correct social manner by which the ladies concerned should be addressed or referred to is “Lady plus her husband’s first name”, like “Lady John”. In this sense, Joly’s creative invention for 琏二奶奶 as Lady Secunda is justified, though his Lady Feng is otherwise. 134 3.3.1.3 McHugh and Wang’s 奶奶 With respect to the two abridged translations, it would be absolutely wrong to assume that they are sure to make transliterated renditions of the title 奶奶 and its compounds. On the contrary, despite their nearly identical foreignizing solutions to 太 太 and 老太太, they now part company and go their own way, which results in great differences between their renditions, as illustrated in Table 3.8 below. Table 3.8 McHugh and Wang’s renditions of Usage Referent 奶奶 McHugh Wang 奶奶 Wang Xifeng (琏)二奶奶 Wang Xifeng Madame Phoenix (Lien) Er Nai-nai 珍大奶奶 Jia Zhen’s wife Mrs. Yu Sister-in-law Chen Gen Sao-sao 璜大奶奶 Jia Huang’s wife Mrs. Huang Mrs (Chia) Huang Huang Ta Nai-nai 蓉大奶奶 Jia Rong’s wife Mrs. Rong Nai-nai Jung (Ta) Nai-nai The table shows that the McHugh sisters abandon their drastic foreignizing orientation and now seek more semantic solutions to the titles in question. And this results in two types of terms depending on whom the ST titles refer to. One category is a kinship term Sister-in-law Chen, which is in itself evidently a result of domestication. The other category includes two titles of courtesy: one is a pure formal rendition Mrs Huang), and the other a mixture of formal and semantic methods, i.e., Madame Phoenix. What is worth noting about the latter is the component Phoenix. It is derived from the semantics of Xifeng’s personal name 熙风. While this combination looks meaningful to the English reader, it betrays the communicative value of the ST title. If we back-translate it, it is easy to see that it runs contrary to the Chinese practice of address. In fact, she is never addressed or referred to by her given name plus the title 135 奶奶6. This means that the stringent social respect she enjoys must be shown at all times. As such, McHugh’s translation constitutes a formal inadequacy, not only when contrasted with its ST counterpart, but also in the terms of the proper English way of address to a woman of her status. As for Wang’s renditions, transliterating remains the sole principle. As he did with the aforementioned ST titles, Wang transliterates every title here and provides literal explanations in footnotes. Even though one of the ST’s titles, i.e., 珍大奶奶 used by Baoyu, is turned into a kinship term Gen Sao-sao, which in Chinese has the same meaning as McHugh’s Sister-in-law Chen, it might as well be taken as appropriate given Bayu and Mrs You’s equal ranking on the horizontal family line. Of course, the social respect and deference of the ST title is lost in the kinship term. And as always, such diametric foreignisations might leave the reader with some extra burden in terms of the semantics of the transliterations. 3.3.1.4 Renditions of 奶奶: Conclusion The five translators’ treatment of the title 奶奶 and its derivatives point to three conclusions. First, while the other translators were moving along their adopted strategies, McHugh abruptly switched to more domesticating measures, leaving Wang as the only one who carried on with the foreignizing method via transliterating. Second, while Hawkes was domesticating the ST title in question, he used, apart from pronouns and kinship terms, 31% of his renditions as general references rather than terms that 6 Although Xifeng’s personal names are sometimes used as intimate addresses, such as 风姐 “Sister Feng” (primarily by Baoyu), 风姑娘 “Miss Feng” (mainly by Mrs Xue and Mrs Zhou), and 风丫头 or “Slave-girl Feng” (by the Dowager Lady exclusively), they are the privileges of few people. 136 both specify the referents and contain the proper respect of the ST speakers. Thirdly, where Hawkes used the uniform title of courtesy Mrs+LN, Yangs and Joly tried to distinguish the referents of the ST title in terms of their respective social status. While Yangs seem more successful in applying madam and Mrs respectively, Joly made a confusing alternation between lady and Mrs. The reason for the failure to distinguish the respective referents might be attributed to the ST’s indiscriminate use of the title to two generations of ladies, wealthy and poor alike. The above observation once again suggests that, where Wang, Joly and Yangs tried to represent as many as possible the C-values of the ST titles in question, they were in fact foreignizing their respective choices in some degrees. In contrast, where Hawkes and McHugh used kinship terms and pronouns, they were in fact adapting the C-values of the ST titles to domestic modes of expression. Seen as a whole, Wang’s work, by avoiding as many variations of title renditions as possible, could be seen as more domesticating than any of the other four translations in that it tries to alleviate the reader’s burden in coming to grips with titles. 3.3.2 姑娘 The term 姑娘 “guniang” or “young girl” is found (from Table 3.9 below) to be used by various people in the ST corpus, from the paramount figure of the Jia House, the Dowager Lady, to the seldom-appearing gentleman Jia She, and to many maids, let alone Baoyu. Like the use of 奶奶, 姑娘 is also used in a complex way, prefixed, sometimes by the family name of a referent (e.g., 林姑娘), sometime by her personal 137 name (e.g., 风姑娘), and sometimes by her order of birth (e.g., 四姑娘). Of the total thirty-one instances of the title, Daiyu receives 55%, which shows how important she is as a maternal granddaughter of the Dowager Lady. The indiscriminate use of the title marks the distance, respect or deference the young ladies designated enjoy in the Jia house. And basing on its semantics as a title of courtesy to young, unmarried mistresses (A Big Chinese Dictionary, 4:319) in the Jia House by both masters and servants, 姑娘’s C-values can be postulated as to be nonkin, female, young, unmarried, and social position. Table 3.9: Use of Usage 姑娘 in the corpus Dyad Mode Referent The old lady – maids 姑 娘 Aunt Xue – Servant Amount 1 Reference the Jia girls 1 Servant – Daiyu 1 Between servants 1 姑 娘 Servants – Baochai Address Baochai 5 风姑娘 Between servants Reference Xifeng 3 Servants – Daiyu Address 6 The old lady – maids (林)姑娘 四姑娘 Baoyu – maids 1 Reference Daiyu 1 Servants – Lady Xing 2 Between servants 7 Between servants Reference Total Jia Xichun 2 31 Note that while the “(un)married status” of the young ladies constitutes one crucial factor of the title 姑娘, exception here has to be made to the servants’ three references to Xifeng via the ad hoc title. Though Xifeng is already married with a daughter now, the application of the title to designate her might be justified on account of the speakers’ knowledge of her before her marriage. Therefore, to render the title, this 138 factor has to be taken into special consideration. As far as the possible renditions for the title are concerned, we would expect Chi-chen Wang to come up with the transliteration Guniang, or Kuniang in the Wade system, with other options including: Miss (FN/LN), young lady, girl, you/she/her. Looking at the various renderings the five translators provide for the title 姑娘 (see Table 3.10 below), we observe a rising trend in using titles of courtesy among the translators. For the diametrically foreignizing Wang, nothing seems worth mentioning because his renditions conform to our assumption of transliteration. As far as those addresses/references made up of a surname plus the title 姑娘 are concerned, they are directly transliterated by means of “Kuniang+LN” with the help of a footnote where such a transliteration first appears. As for the general title where no surname is used, it is done in a simpler way: “Kuniang”, which seems enough for the translator, but not necessarily so for the reader, not at least as far as its C-values go. Contrasted with Wang’s drastic measure of foreignisation are the four translators’ moderate means of foreignisation along the lines of domestication. Remarkably, for the once foreignizing McHughs, they now completely step onto the road to more intelligible means of translation. Even in the small amount of translated titles available for the relevant ST, “Miss+LN” is prevalent while (dear) young lady is put into the mouths of some sweet-tongued maids. As a result, both social respect and personal affection seem to be conveyed in more or less degrees. 139 Table 3.10: Renditions of 姑娘 in Hawkes, Yangs and Joly Chinese Usage Dyad English Mode Referent The old lady – maids 姑 娘 Aunt Xue – Servant Reference the Jia girls Amount Hawkes Yangs Joly 1 the girls the girls the young ladies 1 the Jia girls your three young ladies the three young ladies in your family Servant – Daiyu 1 the others the other girls the other girls Between servants 1 the young ladies the young ladies the young ladies 姑 娘 Servants – Baochai Address Baochai 5 Miss; you; your Miss 4; you Miss 3; my young lady; you 风姑娘 Between servants Reference Xifeng 3 Mrs Lian the young mistress; this Feng; she lady Feng Servants – Daiyu Address 6 Miss Lin; Miss 3; you you…miss; miss 2; you 2 you…miss 3; miss 2; you 1 Miss Lin Miss Lin your mistress, Miss Lin 1 Miss Lin Miss Lin Cousin Lin Servants - Master 2 Miss Lin 2 Miss Lin; the young lady Miss Lin 2 Between servants 7 Miss Lin 7 Miss Lin 7 Miss Lin 7 2 Miss Xi-chun; she the fourth young lady; she Miss Hsi-Ch’un; she 31 30 The old lady – maids (林)姑娘 四姑娘 Reference Baoyu – maids Between servants Reference Total Daiyu Jia Xichun 30 31 140 This feature is shared by the translators of the three complete versions. While they all converge on the choice of the official Miss (LN), Hawkes, by using nineteen instances of such a title of courtesy, allows foreignizing to take precedence over his long-held domesticating orientation. Besides, by using two instances of Mrs Lian, he also makes a meticulous distinction between the unmarried young ladies and the married mistress Xifeng. All together, Hawkes renders 70% of the ST titles in the form of English titles, thus outnumbering Yangs (who replace 57% of the ST titles by Miss (LN)) and nearly equalling to Joly (71% of whose renditions are in the forms of Miss and lady plus first or last names). Since Miss becomes the common normative choice of the four translators, there is a need to look at its C-values. From Webster (1986:1445) and OED (online), the translators’ use of the term as a title of courtesy can find justification from two perspectives: (a) Miss used as a conventional title before the name of an unmarried woman or girl, (b) Miss used in direct address and not followed by the given name or surname of the young woman addressed. The only difference between the ST 姑娘 and the English Miss is that, whereas the ST title assumes the social position of the referent exclusively as an unmarried young woman from a rich or official family, such social position becomes dubious in Miss. 3.4 CONCLUSION This chapter examined both the use and English renditions of four key Chinese titles that are employed to designate the female Jia masters in HLM, i.e., 太太, 老太太, 141 奶奶 and 姑娘. The purpose of the examination is two-fold: a screening of the C-values of the renderings for these titles on the one hand, and an identification of the nature of the renditions with reference to Venuti’s F-D dichotomy on the other. Our examination seems to support the following observations: First and foremost, the investigation repudiates Venuti’s opposing dichotomy of translations. It is found that, for the majority of the translators, and for the majority of the four Chinese titles, their English renditions cannot be simply classified as productions that are either the result of a pure domesticating strategy or the outcome of an out-and-out foreignizing endeavour as Venuti presumes. Except Wang who realised total foreignisation by means of transliteration, no other translators practiced either a domesticating or a foreignizing strategy in a consistent and clear-cut manner. While McHugh’s version indicates a dramatic change in strategy from drastic foreignizing by transliteration to moderate semantic treatment, the other three translations only demonstrate a mixture of both strategies with one strategy playing a more prominent role than the other. For instance, although Hawkes tried to substitute the ST titles with familiar domestic expressions (e.g., kinship terms and pronouns), he could not help adopting some titles of courtesy. In contrast, Yangs and Joly, who were more conspicuous in seeking seemingly congruent English titles of courtesy, had to resort to some kinship terms and even pronouns as well. On the other hand, even the dominant strategy with which a translator was preoccupied had to give way to its friend-and-foe strategy as the circumstance arose. One case in point is Hawkes’s outstanding achievements in adopting titles rather than kinship terms or pronouns for 70% of his 142 renditions in dealing with the title 姑娘. Second, the exercise confirmed our hypothesis about the tripartite relationship between the C-values of an English rendering and its relation to the ST term in question on the one hand, and to the strategy whereby it is produced on the other hand. Basically, it is found that where personal pronouns and kinship terms are chosen, they represent either none or few of the C-values of its ST counterpart, let alone the stringent social stratification and respect exhibited by the ST title. This is because the semantics of distance and respect contained in the ST title gets replaced either by the semantics of affection encapsulated in a TT kinship term, or by the semantics of familiarity carried by a TT pronoun. It is only renditions in the form of titles of courtesy that represent most, even all, of the C-values contained in its ST counterparts. As a corollary, such renderings associate themselves more with a foreignizing orientation than kinship terms and pronouns do. However, it has to be noted that the rendered titles have to be semantically intelligible for the reader to digest both the C-values and the stringent social stratification between the dyads in the ST. Arguably, drastic foreignizing renditions like transliterations could hardly strike the reader as meaningful as they are exotic. Thirdly, the examination suggests that the more domesticated a rendition, the clearer the interpersonal relationship shown. This observation can be best justified in Hawkes’s use of kinship terms in places of ST titles. In fact, we seem to find a principle of tenor in operation in his translation, which iis “Who-is-speaking-to-whom- 143 about-whom”. For instance, depending on the speakers, the Dowager Lady Jia can be Baoyu and Xifeng’s “Grandmother” or “Grandma”, just as Lady Wang can be Xifeng “Auntie” and Jia Rong’s “Great-aunt”. Fourthly, the investigation also lent support to our hypothesis that the smaller the range of renditions a translator provides for the ST titles, the more his/her translation is oriented to domestication or reader-targetedness. This is born out in McHugh and Wang’s nearly identical renderings of the ST titles by just a single transliteration. This observation, however, seems to repudiate the above observation that Hawkes’s renditions for 太太 is more domesticated than those of the other four translators. But in essence the superficial contradiction between the two conclusions can be reconciled in the reader-centred orientation Hawkes and McHugh/Wang share. Where Hawkes’s renditions are seen as more domesticating than the latters’, it is judged solely from the perspective of the C-values the renditions contain. This may be taken as the local perspective of a translation in general. In this vein, Hawkes’s deletion of (some of) the cultural contents of the ST titles could be justified because he aims to alleviate the burden the reader has to undertake in processing the address terms. In contrast, McHugh and Wang’s efforts in consolidating several possible renditions into one invariable form serves to decrease the reader’s general burden of having to come to grips with various terms of address/reference where the same cohorts of people are concerned throughout the translation. This thus constitutes the global perspective of a translation. In the light of this perspective, although the single 144 rendering for the ST counterpart provided by McHugh and Wang is more heavily charged with C-values than any one of the several renderings offered by Hawkes (and Yangs and Joly as well), the total amount of C-values contained in the former is constant and thus much less than the addition of all the various renderings for the same ST title by the latter. Finally, it has also to be noted that there are false friends between a ST title and a seeming TL equivalent. An infamous case in point is the Chinese 老太太 and the English “Old Lady”, which, due to cultural differences, are husband-and-wife on the same bed but with different dreams. Awareness should thus be kept on such false friends in deciding a TT constitute for an ST title. 145 [...]... for foreignizing in translation xii LIST OF TABLES Table 1.1 Previous studies of the translations of HLM……………….…………….28 Table 2.1 Sun’s principles of address used in HLM……… …………………….…73 Table 3.1 Titles for the Jias in the corpus…………………………….………………92 Table 3.2 Renditions of minor titles for the Jias…… …………………………… 93 Table 3.3 Use of 太太 in the corpus………… ………………………….………… 95 Table 3.4 Renditions of 太太 in. .. 《红楼梦》 or Red Chamber Dream 2 ) (to be abbreviated as HLM hereinafter) with reference to their renditions of eight titles and thirty-five honorific expressions that appear in these chapters While both titles and honorifics pertain to the general category of Terms of address or TA for short, TA is here taken as an umbrella term which includes titles, kinship terms and honorifics (both self-deprecatory and. .. various terms of address used in the novel into four groups, i.e., titles, kinship terms, honorofics and emotional terms He then outlines four principles governing the use of these types of terms respectively, by members, relatives and servants of the Jia House in HLM The four principles are Principle of Social Stratification, Principle of Patriarchal Clan, Principle of Politeness and Principle of Emotion... as a way of analyzing and explaining how translators deal with Chinese titles and honorifics concerned 1.1.2 Translation as Choices The definition of language and culture serves as a vantage point for a cultural approach to translation as taking place in concrete, definable situations that involve members of different cultures (Chesterman, 1993:2; Nord, 1997:23) Since translating means comparing cultures... an organization of these things It is the forms of things that people have in mind, their model of perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them The anthropological view of culture emphasises both the cognitive and social aspects of culture: the former guides and monitors humans actions while the latter stresses the traditional features shared by members of a society The guiding and sharing of. .. the individual one pertaining to the individual’s guidelines of thinking and acting According to House (ibid), this level constitutes cultural consciousness “which enables a human being to be aware of what characterises his or her own culture and makes it distinct from others.” 4 The integration of human, social and individual views of culture thus likens culture to “the collective programming of the... will involve some degree of linguistic modification at the level of texture (2) The more meaning or cultural values a rendition acquires, the nearer it is orientated to the meaning values of its ST counterpart In contrast, the fewer meaning values a rendition scores, the farther away it is orientated from the meaning values of the ST original And as a corollary, (3) A foreignizing strategy results in. .. Ji and 40 chapters of continuation believed to be written by Gao E (高鹗) when it was first published in 1791-1792 1.3.2 English Translations 1.3.2.1 General introduction The allegorical and marvellous framework of HLM brings a colouring more Buddhist than Taoist to the work, playing on the reality and fiction underlying the sufferings that threaten when the enjoyment of life in the enchanted world of. .. the use of Chinese terms of address in HLM According to Wierzbicka (1991:333), 1 As will be mentioned later in this chapter, different English titles are used for its various translations To do fair to all translators, and to avoid confusion, pinyin, the Chinese spelling system, is adopted throughout this thesis to refer to the Chinese original 2 For purpose of reference and comparison, Chinese terms,... the caste of the peerage in both English and Chinese shares consist of: (1) the division of peers into five ranks (i.e., Baron, Viscount, Earl, Marquis, and Duke), (2) the conferment of a noble title by a king or queen in Britain and an emperor in old China respectively, (3) the heritability of the title by the eldest son of the conferred, and (4) the customary naming of a place as a territorial designation