The constraints of translating martial arts fiction

This article comments on the notion of ‘constraint’ by analysing the specific difficulties in the translation of a martial arts (‘wuxia’) novel into French and English. The Legend of the Condor Heroes (射鵰英雄傳, she diao ying xiong zhuan) is the first part of the ‘Condor Trilogy’ (射鵰三部曲, she diao san bu qu), the masterpiece of Chinese writer Jin Yong (金庸). Little known in the West, the novel was recently translated by Anna Holmwood and Wang Jiann-Yuh. This article studies the strategies adopted by each translator to render the cultural specificities of the source context in the target culture. By so doing, it contributes to theoretical debates concerning transfers between two distant literary and cultural systems.

A Serendipitous Comparison? Jin Yong and J. R. R. Tolkien: Genre, Prosimetrum and Modern Medievalism East and West

In recent years, the legendary Hong Kong author Jin Yong has been referred to in Anglophone media as ‘China's Tolkien’, but the basis for that comparison has been disregarded by Sinologists for valid reasons. However, the very establishment of the comparison, even on questionable grounds, may be a stroke of serendipity. This essay probes the Tolkien-Jin Yong comparison from a literary perspective, arguing that the comparison is often made on the basis of fundamental misconceptions, but that it is nevertheless serendipitously apt for reasons that have remained unexplored. Identifying Jin Yong and Tolkien as influential modern literary medievalists, the essay shifts the Tolkien-Jin Yong comparison from the problematic terrain of genre to the firmer ground of medievalist antiquarianism, with important implications for questions of cultural identity, historical reconstruction and narrative form.

Cluster Analysis and Visualization for the Legend of the Condor Heroes Based on Social Network

The Legend of the Condor Heroes (LCH) is one of the fifteen well-known Wuxia novels penned by Jin Yong. It portrays a number of characters in the background of the Southern Song Dynasty. In this research, we attempt to analyze the relationship of characters in LCH based on social network, including network feature analysis, cluster analysis, and data visualization. Moreover, the approach can be extended to other literary works because our research provides a general framework for analyzing character relationships. We first perform lexical analysis on the corpus to extract character names and then utilize co-word analysis to build a social network of character relationships. We reckon characters as nodes and count the cooccurrences of characters as weights of links. By applying the social network analysis of created network, we can obtain network features of LCH. Furthermore, a hierarchical clustering algorithm is implemented to study the structure of LCH network. Both the dendrogram and Venn diagram are used for data visualization. An improved approach of visualizing the clustering results is advanced in order to display the group and hierarchical structure better. The final experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method shows a good effect.

翻譯金庸：武俠小說特色與讀者接受度間的平衡，以《射鵰英雄傳》為例

<p>金庸作品含有大量不存在於西方概念的文化詞──中華文化、歷史、武術、儒釋道思想交織其中。經分析《射鵰英雄傳（一）》中的人名、外號和功夫招式的英譯後，發現譯者選用策略並無明顯模式，策略不一致尤其造成姓名順序混亂。唯一明確的兩個規律是：一、譯者傾向使用貼近原著的翻譯策略，包括音譯、直譯及語義翻譯，大量保留原文文化特色及語言形式。二、對於歷史人物或含有典故的人名多採用音譯，少數人名添加直譯於其後。另外，本研究發現一項值得關注的新策略：「特色刻畫」，主要用來翻譯人名，複製金庸塑造的人物形象，屬於以讀者為中心的策略。本研究歸納出特色刻畫的類型，能作為往後研究或翻譯的基礎，協助譯者加以應用於文化詞翻譯。</p> <p>&nbsp;</p><p>The expressions in Jin Yong&rsquo;s works feature culture-loaded terms and concepts mostly absent in Western culture: traditional Chinese culture, historical circumstances, martial arts, and Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. After analyzing names of characters, nicknames, and names of fighting moves in A Hero Born: Legends of the Condor Heroes I, the present study found few patterns of translation strategy. The strategy inconsistency especially made the translated name order varied. Only two patterns were certain: 1) The translator tended to use author-oriented methods, including transliteration, literal translation, and semantic translation, largely preserving the culture and language form of the source text. 2) Names of historical figures or with allusion were transliterated, a few of which were followed by literal translation. A noteworthy new strategy characterization identified by this study was mainly adopted in translating names of characters. This reader-oriented method attempted to replicate the characters&rsquo; images portrayed by Jin Yong. The present study has deduced types of characterization to which future research or translation may refer to in applying translation strategies for culture-loaded terms. </p> <p>&nbsp;</p>