On scholar translators in literary translation – a case study of Kinkley's translation of ‘Biancheng’

Abstract In literary translation, scholar translators distinguish themselves by resorting to discernibly different translation strategies. This paper is a case study of the English translation of Shen Congwen's novella ‘Biancheng’ (Border Town) by a scholar translator – Jeffrey C. Kinkley, a renowned American scholar of history and sinology. Compared with the previous translators of ‘Biancheng’, Kinkley demonstrates obvious differences in his choices, which can be analyzed through his two conspicuous translation strategies: the in-text explications and the out-text endnotes. He tries to re-present as much as possible the unique Chinese expressions in the source text (ST) by inserting extra explanations to what is implied in those expressions. He also provides dozens of endnotes to supply background information of historical, cultural, and local significance, and of ST editions and further readings. Drawing on Casanova's framework (Casanova, 2010), this paper discusses the significance of the translation by probing into the positions of the source language (SL) and the target language (TL), of the author, and of the translator. I demonstrate that the choices made by Kinkley betray his structured habitus as a scholar translator. On the basis of this case study, we might hypothesize that once a text is selected for translation, the position of the translator has greater decisive power; that a scholar translator is more visible in the target text (TT); and that the stronger the academic background of the translator, the more ST-oriented the translation. Keywords: in-text explicationsout-text endnotesscholar translatorshabitus Notes 1. The Complete Works of Shen Congwen, 32 volumes, edited by Zhang Zhaohe (Shen's wife) et al., and published by Beiyue Wenyi Chubanshe in 2002. 2. The old Wade-Giles spelling of ‘Congwen's’. 3. For example, the ‘Shen Congwen’ items in The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature (2003) and Dictionary of Literary Biography – Chinese Fiction Writers, 1900–1949 (2007). 4. Information obtained from Prof. Kinkley's email to the author. 5. Gladys Yang first had this translation published in Chinese Literature in 1962, and in 1981 it was included in the anthology The Border Town and Other Stories, for which she made some minor changes, especially in the spellings of proper names. 6. But why do these two people have to do this behind the back of the girl's father? A possible explanation is that they are from different nationalities. At that time people from the Miao Pale were not allowed to marry people of Han nationality. 7. http://databases.unesco.org/xtrans/stat/xTransList.a?lg=0, accessed 25 April 2010. 8. In the modern Chinese context, literature belongs to the ‘spiritual field’.