Translators’ Voice and the Deformation of the Translation: A Study on the English Translation of Sishui Weilan (2014)

The English translation of LI Jieren's historical novel Sishui Weilan published in 2014 is largely ignored by scholars of translation studies both at home and abroad.However, due to the forceful presence of the translators' voice, the translation takes on characteristics not commonly seen in the history of the English translation of modern Chinese stories.The present research, guided by the theory of translator's voice, traces the translators' forceful audible presence in this translation on both textual and paratextual levels.The research finds that on the textual level, the translators' voice manifests itself via the rewriting of the novel's narrative structure as well as the visualization and foreignization of the target text, thus deviating from the narrative and linguistic styles of the source text, and that on the paratextual level, the translators make their voice audible via defictionalization and historical and cultural value assignment, thus recasting the novel as a prophecy of the time and a historical and cultural reader of Chengdu.The translators' forceful audible presence is ostensibly dictated by the translators' "unorthodox" view of faithfulness, but fundamentally by "the pact-inviting mechanism" prevalent in translated literature.