The Gain and Loss in Cross-Cultural Translation: An explorative study of the English & Japanese renditions of Pai Hsien-yung's Taipei People

得魚忘筌，得意忘言？－淺論白先勇《臺北人》英、日譯本之得與失

李明哲(Lee Ming-Che)

《臺灣文學研究學報》 32期 (2021/04) Pp. 193-232

摘要

Literary translation is closely related to linguistic and cultural contexts specific to the source and target literatures. With that view in mind, Roman Alvarez and M. Carmen-Africa Vidal presuppose that literary translation has to be culture-bound. Linguistic anthropologist Michael Agar coined the term ＂languaculture,＂ identifying the inseparability between language and culture, which is what makes translation an act of ＂rendering foreignness.＂ Distinguished scholars, such as Antoine Berman, Lawrence Venuti and Paul Ricoeur, have agreeably acknowledged linguacultural plurivocity-a concept which highlights the heterogeneity across languages/cultures and the autonomy of translated corpus. Pai Hsien-yung has topped the list of the most translated modernist writers from Taiwan. His diaspora-themed masterpiece Taipei People has been translated into several foreign languages. Based on Agar's conceptualization of languaculture, this paper first examines the differences in the translator's notes from the English and Japanese versions of this work with regards to the denoting of conventional proper nouns. Next, it employs Berman's ＂textual deformation＂ approach and J. F. Aixelá's strategies in rendering culture-specific items (CSIs), seeking to probe into how the source text's hybridity and foreignness, which are manifested in its vulgar language, idiolects, and culture-loaded expressions involving inextricable untranslatability, have been made visible or invisible once represented within the terrain of World Literature.

關鍵字

Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) ； Literary Translation ； Pai Hsien-yung ； Taipei People ； World Literature

並列摘要

文學翻譯和源語及譯語所處的語言文化語境息息相關。Alvarez & Vidal認為文學翻譯勢必受到源語文化脈絡的牽制；Agar創「言語文化（languaculture）」一詞申論語言與文化之難割難捨，翻譯即「翻異」；Berman、Venuti和Ricoeur等人亦認可語言文化的繁複多音性，致力於突顯不同語言文化之間的異質性及翻譯文本的自主性。白先勇貴為臺灣現代主義文學外譯的首選作家之一，其離散文學代表作《臺北人》先後譯為多國語言出版。本文首先從言語文化面向出發，比較英、日譯本處理專有名詞的譯注差異；其次，援引Berman的文本變形理論（textual deformation），佐以Aixelá的文化詞翻譯對策，多方考察原作之混雜性和異域性（hybridity & foreignness），包括粗俗話、個人方言及文化承載詞等，在源語文本的不可譯性（untranslatability）阻隔下，如何以世界文學（World Literature）之姿，現身或隱身於譯入語文本。

並列關鍵字

文化詞 ； 文學翻譯 ； 白先勇 ； 《台北人》 ； 世界文學

參考文獻

Boris Buden, Stefan Nowotny, Sherry Simon, Ashok Bery and Michael Cronin, “Cultural Translation: An Introduction to the Problem, and Responses,”Translation Studies 2.2 (2009), pp. 196-219, doi:10.1080/14781700902937730

Wu Bo, “Cong ziyi kan yizhe de renwu: yi Taipeiren de fanyi wei gean” (On the Task of the Translator: A Case Study on the Self-translation of Taibei People), Shandong Foreign Language Teaching Journal 103 (2004), pp. 65-68, doi: 10.16482/j.sdwy37-1026.2004.06.001

Andrew Chesterman, “Proposal for a Hieronymic Oath,” in The Return to Ethics: Special Issue of The Translator 7.2, ed. Anthony Pym (2001), pp. 139-154.

Antoine Berman, “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign,” trans. Lawrence Venuti, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 240-253.

Anton Popovic, A Dictionary for the Analysis of Literary Translation (Edmonton: University of Alberta, 1976).