| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 翻譯研究所 === 105 === The present study focuses on the comparison of the similarities and differences between two Chinese translated versions of Fahrenheit 451 published in Taiwan and in China. The research was carried out based on Newmarks’s (1988a, 1988b) communicative translation theory and Guo’s (2004) three criteria for translating science fiction (literariness, scientificity, and popularity) for further analysis.
From a literary perspective, descriptions of settings and characters were analyzed. Through data analysis, this study found that both translators of the two Chinese versions favored employing either four-character Chinese idioms or repeated words to make the translation more eloquent. Furthermore, whenever parallel structure was used in the source text, they both stuck to the parallel structure so as to create the same effects. The difference between the two translated versions was that the traditional Chinese version stayed faithful to the source text and rendered the text literally. On the other hand, the simplified Chinese version paraphrased the text to replicate the scenes from the novel. In most cases, the second approach produced a more accurate translation of the scenes and characters in the novel, but sometimes the translation departed from the source text.
From a scientific perspective, technological neologisms were discussed. Through analyzing the two versions of the translated text and comparing them with the source material, it was worth pointing out that both Yu (2006) and Zhu (2005) chose not to coin new lexical items. Instead, they translated technological neologisms by their modern equivalents in the target language. If no direct equivalent could be found for the neologism, they either utilized expressions that have similar concepts or revised an existing counterpart with a similar syntactic structure as the source text and utilized it as the equivalent. If these ways did not work, Mr. Yu and Ms. Zhu chose to adopt different approaches to technological neologisms. Yu, the translator of the traditional Chinese, preferred to faithfully follow the punctuation of the source text and translated it literally. In contrast, Ms. Zhu, the translator of the simplified Chinese version, preferred to ignore the uncommon usage of capitals in the target language. She tended to employ descriptive expressions to make the scientific features more comprehensible to the readers, which enables the readership to engage with the text.
From a popular perspective, the study was conducted in two parts, word groups and sentences. In terms of word groups, words and phrases, the conceptual, contextual, and collocative meanings were analyzed. In terms of sentences, sentence reconstruction and rephrasing were explored. This study found that both Yu and Zhu had excellent translations in that they boldly recast the syntactic structures of the source text to make them fit in with common Chinese usage. Nevertheless, through comparison, it was easy to find both translators more or less stayed too close to the source text structure, so their translations seemed clumsy in the target language.
It is easy to see that there was a large amount of research on a variety of literary topics with the exception of research on the translation of science fiction. Hence, through analyzing examples from previously published translated works, this present study aimed at comparing two Chinese translated versions of the same English science fiction novel in order to offer translators some references to learn from and avoid making same errors.
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