- 期刊
Journey to the West: Identifying the Methods of Reaching the Destination
《西遊記》角色名稱英譯探討
並列摘要
This article aims to identify the translation methods for processing names of gods, demons, monsters, and humans in a renowned Chinese classic, Journey to the West. Written by Fen Menglong in the Ming dynasty, this novel incorporates an abundance of then religious beliefs, folklore, legends, cultures, and politics. Because of this characteristic, many names appearing in this masterpiece bear cultural elements, which may disappear through the method of literal translation. To understand how translators retained the elements of every name, a corpus was constructed for studying the names and their English translations. In this corpus, only Jenner's and Yu's translations were selected because their works were the only two complete versions that could be accessed before this study commenced. Through the analysis, six methods were identified: (1) adopting the Sanskrit transliteration; (2) adopting the Chinese transliteration; (3) combining the Sanskrit and Chinese transliteration; (4) word-based translation; (5) meaning-based translation, and (6) providing footnotes. In addition, three differences exist between the methods identified in this study and those proposed by former scholars: the impossible use of direct copy, three kinds of transliteration, and higher use frequency of footnotes. The other observation is the special use of Sanskrit transliteration in tackling the names of Buddhist gods. This phenomenon derives from the fact that Buddhism originated in India, and it is more likely that non-Chinese readers know the names of Buddhist gods by Sanskrit.
延伸閱讀
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