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Pragmatic shifts in two translations of Fusheng LiujiA descriptive study of request behaviour*

Vincent X. WangThe University of Macau

This study focuses on translation shifts in speech act realisation patterns in two English translations of the Chinese work Fusheng Liuji. It employs analytical tools from cross-cultural pragmatics to describe speech act behaviour in the original and its translations. Lin uses more translation shifts — including sig-nificant shifts in strategy use, and moderate shifts in information sequencing — than Pratt & Chiang, who mainly retain the original pragmatic features. Both the translators and the original author make frequent use of request formulae. The two translations also show marked shifts from lexical to syntactic modification of requests. The article further examines the translators’ approaches to transla-tion in terms of their concept of translation and the historical and social contexts of their translations.

Keywords: translation shift, cross-cultural pragmatics, translation norm, request, formulaic language, Chinese literature

1. Introduction

Translation shifts have long been a core issue in translation studies. Vinay and Darbelnet (1958/1995) used the term ‘transposition’ to refer to the phenomenon whereby a word from a given word class shifts to another class in the process of translation. Catford (1965) conducted a more systematic study of translation shifts, and proposed two types of shift — level and category shifts. Catford’s ap-proach is based on Hallidayan systemic-functional grammar, and is intrinsically linguistics-oriented. He defines translation shifts as “departures from formal cor-respondence in the process of going from the SL to the TL,” and claims that formal equivalence is achievable only in rare cases, since “every language is formally sui generis and formal correspondence is, at best, a rough approximation” (1965: 36).

Target 21:2 (2009), 209–234. doi 10.1075/target.21.2.01wanissn 0924–1884 / e-issn 1569–9986 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

© 2009. John Benjamins Publishing CompanyAll rights reserved

210 Vincent X. Wang

For Catford, translation shifts at various grammatical levels are unavoidable. Toury (1995) addresses the issues of translation norms and translation shifts in the con-text of descriptive translation studies. Norms refer to values and ideas shared by a community, that govern the ways in which language is used. For Toury, even the notion of equivalence is closely related to norms: “it is norms that determine the (type and extent of) equivalence manifested by actual translations” (1995: 61). Since the norms operating in the source-language (SL) and target-language (TL) communities do not coincide, a translator needs to negotiate the differences be-tween these two distinct systems of norms and conventions — in other words, between two cultures (Pym 2004). The translator can either attach importance to source-language norms, which leads to an adequate translation; or subscribe to target-language norms, which facilitates acceptability in the target culture (Toury 1995: 57). The latter strategy tends to lead to translation shifts. Toury (1995) dis-tinguishes between obligatory and non-obligatory shifts, and points out that non-obligatory shifts constitute the majority of shifts in human translation.

Following Catford’s earlier work, research has continued on the theme of translation shifts in linguistic properties. Some recent studies include: Cosme (2006), which examines shifts from coordination to subordination structures in translations from English to French; Korzen (2005), which looks at shifts between endocentric and exocentric language features in Danish-Italian translation; and Puurtinen (2003), which focuses on the strategies of implicating and explicating via linguistic means in translation. There have also been studies of shifts in lin-guistic features in Chinese-English translation: Li (1998), for instance, observes that shifts between clauses and phrases frequently occur, since Chinese is mainly a topic-prominent language, while English is subject prominent. Translation shifts in terms of language-specific rhetorical features have attracted special attention. For example, Al-Khafaji (2006) finds that lexical repetitions in Arabic texts tend to become non-repetition in English translations. Other studies have focused on translation shifts at discoursal level, including shifts in cohesion and cohesiveness (Blum-Kulka 1986). Recent research has examined translation shifts from the per-spectives of contrastive stylistics, focusing on translators’ strategies for maneuver-ing between styles, and have demonstrated that various types of shift are employed for the purposes of either retaining the original style or transmitting meaning ef-fectively (Boase-Beier 2004). Effective use of translation shifts relies on the creativ-ity of translators, who invoke ‘creative transpositions’, a term invented by Jakob-son in reference to poetry translation (1959/2000). This growing body of work on translation shifts has significantly broadened the scope of research on translation shifts compared to Catford’s (1965) original work (Hatim and Munday 2004).

Previous studies have thus shown that translation shifts can occur at various linguistic levels. Of these levels, the pragmatic level — which deals with meaning


Pragmatic shifts in two translations of Fusheng Liuji 211

derived from language use in context — deserves particular attention. For exam-ple, Baker (1992) dedicates an entire chapter to “pragmatic equivalence” in her textbook on translation; and Leuven-Zwart (1989) proposes a category known as “syntactic-pragmatic modification” that includes three subcategories in her so-phisticated and comprehensive model of translation shifts (1989: 170). In the next section, we examine pragmatics and translation by surveying the relevant litera-ture to draw out the research focus of the present study.

2. Cross-cultural pragmatics and translation studies

A number of translation scholars have sought to use pragmatic theories to in-vestigate translation problems. Gutt (1991) believes that relevance theory can be the fundamental theoretical basis for translation studies. Emery (2004) applies the insights of pragmatics to examine three key terms in translation theory — trans-lation, equivalence and fidelity — and states that “[pragmatics] can be expected to make continuing and increasing contributions to the discipline of translation studies” (2004: 166). By applying a series of notions of pragmatics, including speech act, implicature, illocutionary and perlocutionary force, presupposition, contextualised meaning, and politeness maxims, Abdel-Hafiz (2003) identifies problems in the English translation of an Arabic literary work, The Thief and the Dogs. Similarly, Farghal & Borini (1997) detect problems in the English transla-tion of Najib Mahfouz’s (1959) novel Awlad Haritna, in that many Arabic formulae fail to “evoke comparable religious shades of meaning” in their English transla-tions. They term this problem “pragmareligious failure” (77). For the purpose of evaluating implicated meaning in translation, Wang (2007) proposes a working framework based on the pragmatic concepts of generalised and particularised im-plicatures, perlocutionary force, and context projection, and empirically tests the usefulness of this framework.

Translation researchers have also examined the pragmatic properties of trans-lation in their own right. The thirteen contributions in Hickey (1998) investigate a wide range of topics relating to pragmatics in translation, including illocution-ary function and its translatability, politeness equivalence, deixis, presupposition, cooperation with readers, implicatures, and hedges. Along similar lines, Sequeiros (2002) looks at pragmatic enrichment in translation, pointing out that the causes of pragmatic enrichment relate to (a) linguistic incompatibility between source and target languages, and (b) contextual or cultural variations. Bourne (2002) studies English speech act report verbs (e.g. ‘said’), and finds that their Spanish translations — a range of Spanish report verbs — pragmatically entail different illocutionary forces from those of the English originals. In addition, Mason et al.


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(2003) focus on deixis in the English translations of Romanian novels and short stories, and observe a tendency towards distancing in the process of translation — shifts from proximals to distals.

In relation to a wide range of research issues in the field of pragmatics and translation, the notion of speech acts stands out as a key theoretical concept that denotes the fact that interlocutors do things — conduct social interactions — by using language (Austin 1962). Cross-cultural pragmatic studies have shown that languages and cultures differ markedly in their norms and conventions for per-forming speech acts (Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper 1989; Cohen 1996; Kasper and Rose 1999). For instance, requests — probably the most studied speech act — tend to be formulated with different degrees of directness across languages and language varieties (Blum-Kulka and House 1989). In English, conventionally-in-direct strategies are the most frequently used (Blum-Kulka 1989; Marquez Reiter 2000; Trosborg 1995). It is often safer to use conventionally-indirect strategies than other strategies for two main reasons. Firstly, indirect utterances sound less coer-cive, given an understanding that requests are an act that can threaten the hearer’s negative face — his/her free will to (or not to) comply with the request without feeling imposed upon (Brown and Levinson 1987). Secondly, they are convention-ally used in a given speech community to make requests, and the illocutionary force of those requests is clear and easily recovered (Searle 1975). This means that the hearer can directly access the intended illocutionary force, which is indirectly and conventionally conveyed, without going through the process of recovering the literal meaning of the utterance (Gibbs 1986).

On the other hand, Chinese speakers tend to prefer direct requests, since they attach more importance to frankness, efficiency of communication, and solidar-ity among in-group members (Lee-Wong 1994; Scollon and Scollon 1995; Wang 2006; Yu 1999). For Chinese speakers, to enhance the hearer’s positive face is often a priority — i.e. they want to satisfy the hearer’s desire to be approved of or ap-preciated by other group members. Chinese requests can therefore sound odd to English ears. For example, when Chinese speakers use direct requests to ask for a small favour from a passer-by, by saying 請幫我們照張相 Qing bang women zhao zhang xiang ‘Please help us take a picture’, English speakers, who normally prefer conventionally-indirect strategies such as Would you mind taking a picture for us?, may find the Chinese request rather too direct, coercive, or abrupt.

There are therefore pronounced differences in preferred request behaviour between Chinese and English speaking cultures. Such differences may lead to cross-cultural misunderstandings, and therefore require careful handling. If we take the translation of Chinese requests into English as an example, if the transla-tion preserves a strong Chinese-like directness, English readers may tend to incor-rectly assume that Chinese interlocutors treat one another impolitely. However, if



Chinese requests are rendered into very English-like indirect requests, while this may appear natural to English readers, the original Chinese flavour is unfortu-nately lost. We will investigate empirically and descriptively what translators do to cope with cross-cultural differences in request behaviour.

The present study examines the classic Chinese work Fusheng Liuji and its two English translations (cf. the Method section), focusing on two research questions:

1. Do the translators invoke translation shifts in their use of speech act realisa-tion patterns, in respect of strategy use, request formulae, and internal and external modifications?

There are two different approaches that the translators can use to deal with dif-fering request realisation patterns across languages: They can either shift their speech act behaviour to suit the norms and conventions of the target speech community, or they can preserve as much as possible the Chinese speech act realisation patterns. Given that Chinese request behaviour in Fusheng Liuji may be markedly different from the patterns that modern English speakers are familiar with, our working assumption is that a certain degree of shifting is necessary. In certain situations, for example, the translators may prefer to replace direct requests in the Chinese original with conventionally-indirect strategies in their translations, so that the protagonists do not appear to be unnecessarily coercive or blunt in the eyes of English readers.

2. Do the two translations make use of translation shifts differently? Previous studies have suggested that different translators display individual

variations in their work (Malmkjaer 1998). In addition, it is useful to examine translated works in the historical and social contexts of the times in which they are produced (Hermans 1999: Ch 5; Lambert and Gorp 1985). We will investigate whether the translators of Fusheng Liuji — Lin, and Pratt & Chiang — use translation shifts differently. The findings will be discussed in relation to (a) the specific historical and social contexts in which the translators worked, and (b) the translators’ own concepts of translation.

The present study thus has a rather tightly defined scope — request behaviour in particular literary translations from Chinese into English — an area in which there has been little empirical research to date. It seeks to gather more descriptive information about translation shifts at a pragmatic level in order to complement the findings of more macroscopic and holistic studies.


214 Vincent X. Wang

3. Method

3.1 Sample: The original and the translated texts

Fusheng Liuji (浮生六記) is the autobiography of a Chinese scholar, Shen Fu (沈复1763–1825), who lived in the city of Suzhou during the mid-Qing dynasty. Shen Fu boldly and faithfully tells the story of his wife (Yün) and himself, touching on topics such as their adolescent love, happily married life, and deep and lasting af-fection for one another. He recounts the story of the couple’s simple, peaceful and full life plainly, frankly and touchingly. Few Chinese scholars have detailed their married lives — a rather daring topic at the time — but Shen Fu writes of this topic in exquisite terms. Fusheng Liuji is highly valued in classic Chinese literature, and has been translated into seven languages — English, German, French, Danish, Swedish, Japanese and Malay. An important novel of roughly the same period is Hong Lou Meng, which many consider to be the best work of classical Chinese fiction. Studies of Hong Lou Meng have revealed that it contains requests that use predominantly direct strategies (Skewis 2003), so it seems reasonable to assume that Fusheng Liuji will also exhibit directness in request strategies. The present study confirms this hypothesis.

There are three English translations of Fusheng Liuji: the first by Lin Yutang (1935), the next by Shirley Black (1960), and the most recent by Leonard Pratt & Chiang Su-Hui (1983). Black’s text is not suitable for our purposes, because she abridges, truncates and rearranges the text substantially. We will investigate the other two translations — those by Lin and Pratt & Chiang — because both faith-fully preserve the original content. Lin’s translation is one of the earliest attempts to introduce classic Chinese fictions to western readers (Huang and Pollard 1998; McMorran 2000), an area in which he made a remarkable contribution throughout his life. Lin’s translation, titled Six Chapters of a Floating Life, has gained great pop-ularity with English readers since it was first serialised in T’ien Hsia Monthly (天下月刊: 1935) and Hsi Feng (西風: 1936). Pratt & Chiang’s (1983) translation appeared around fifty years later, under the title Six Records of a Floating Life, as one of the thirteen translated Chinese works in the prestigious Penguin Classics Series. Com-pared to Lin Yutang’s earlier translation initiatives, translated Chinese literature in the Penguin Classics targets a more modern readership, and tends to pay more attention to preserving both the language form and content of the original(Hegel 1986; Wang 1976; Yang 1980). It may be worth noting that Pratt & Chiang’s text was recently selected as the English translation of Fusheng Liuji to appear in the major nation-wide Library of Chinese Classics (大中華文庫) project. We will exam-ine the socio-historical contexts of the times when Lin and Pratt & Chiang worked, and their concepts of translation, in more detail in the Discussion section.



Stylistically, Fusheng Liuji is a narrative work. However, it does not follow the pattern of traditional Chinese biographies that record events chronologically. The work mainly focuses on the love story, using an intriguing and non-chron-ological plot structure, and shows the author’s subjectivity, self-expression, and identity — features that emerged in a number of Qing biographies (Huang 1995). Shen Fu thus uses an innovative genre for his time, termed ‘confessional prose’ (Doleželová-Velingerová and Doležel 1972). It is beyond the scope of the present study to conduct an in-depth analysis of the literary qualities and style of Fusheng Liuji. The two translations by Lin and Pratt & Chiang are consistent with the origi-nal work in narrative approach.

3.2 Methods of data analysis: the coding scheme

A number of studies have examined the English translations of Fusheng Liuji from holistic, macroscopic, and at times impressionist perspectives. The majority of re-searchers have found that Lin Yutang renders Shen Fu’s work gracefully and ex-pressively into mature and smooth prose (Dong 2002; Li 2007). Reviewers also applaud Black’s rendition for its accuracy and grace (Birch 1961); whereas Pratt & Chiang’s translation has rarely been studied, except by Wei (2005). The present investigation concentrates on a narrower and less researched area than previous studies — speech act behaviour. Speech act behaviour merits investigation in its own right, because it is central to language use in social interaction and tends to reflect specific cultural values.

We concentrate here on the instances of a particular speech act — request-ing — and how they are reproduced by Lin Yutang and Pratt & Chiang in their translations. In a request, the speaker directs the hearer to do something (Austin 1962; Searle 1969). We have identified ninety four request utterances in the Chi-nese original, which occur in conversations between Shen Fu and his wife, Yün, or in communication between Shen Fu or Yün and their children and other family members, their friends, acquaintances, or service people. The Chinese text is com-pared with its English translations to determine translation shifts. The number of English translations is slightly lower because some request utterances have been either omitted by the translators or reproduced in reported speech in which prag-matic features are untraceable.

We adopt Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) coding scheme to analyse request reali-sation patterns in our sample. This coding scheme has been used extensively in cross-cultural pragmatic studies (Achiba 2003; Marquez Reiter 2000; Rose 2000; Trosborg 1995; Wang 2006; Yu 1999). Translation shifts are identified by compar-ing the original request utterance with its translations in terms of strategy use, request formulae, and internal and external modifications.


216 Vincent X. Wang

The strategy type of a request utterance is determined by its head act. Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) coding scheme makes a distinction between the head act and supportive moves: the head act is the core of the request sequence, and is the mini-mal unit in which a request is realised. In

(1) John, get me a beer, please. I’m terribly thirsty. (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989: 275)

get me a beer is the head act, the core of the request utterance, and I’m terribly thirsty is a supportive move that gives additional information to justify the request. The supportive move I’m terribly thirsty is peripheral to the request because it can be omitted from the utterance without invalidating the request; get me a beer itself stands as a clear request. The head act get me a beer belongs to the strategy type mood derivable, and (1) is coded as a direct request.

Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) coding scheme distinguishes three types of request strategy: direct, conventionally indirect, and non-conventionally indirect (see Ta-ble 1). We have generated the strategy distribution patterns of the original and the translated texts, and measured inter-group variance statistically.

Formulaic expressions represent an important aspect of speech-act realisation patterns. The term ‘formulaic expressions’ refers to fixed expressions, set phrases and conversational routines that are conventionally used in recurring situations. Request formulae are frequently used because they have the advantages of convey-ing conventional meaning and promoting effective communication. In terms of

Table 1. Strategy types in requests (adapted from Blum-Kulka et al.1989)

Strategies types Examples

Direct strategies

01 Mood Derivable Clean up the kitchen.

02 Explicit Performative I’m asking you to move your car.

03 Hedged Performative I would like to ask you to move your car.

04 Obligation Statement You’ll have to move the car.

05 Want Statement I want you to move your car.

Conventionally-Indirect strategies

06 Suggestory Formulae How about cleaning up?

07 Query Preparatory Could you clean up the mess in the kitchen?

Non-Conventionally Indirect strategies

08 Strong Hints (A) You’ve left the kitchen in a right mess.

09 Mild Hints (B) We don’t want any crowding. [a request for the hearer to move their car]



the theme of translation shifts, we investigate whether request formulae are fre-quently used to construct utterances in the Chinese original, and to what extent this is the case in the English translations.

Internal modifications are lexical or syntactic features that appear in the head act of the request to mitigate or aggravate the tone of requesting, often to tone down coerciveness and express politeness (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). Internal mod-ifiers can be lexical or syntactic devices. For example, Could I possibly use your laptop? contains the lexical modifier possibly, and the syntactic device could (a conditional verb) that mitigate the request within the head act.

External modifications in cross-cultural pragmatic studies mainly relate to supportive moves. As mentioned above, supportive moves are the segments of the utterance that justify the request or engage the hearer (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). Cross-cultural pragmatic studies normally examine the types of supportive moves that are used, and in what position the supportive moves occur in relation to the head act of the request — i.e. information sequencing. There are four distinct pos-sibilities for information sequencing: the null, the pre-posed, the post-posed, and the bi-position. For example, Get me a beer please. I’m terribly thirsty is an example of the post-posed position of a supportive move, since the supportive move I’m terribly thirsty is placed after the request; whereas I’m terribly thirsty. Get me a beer please is a case of the pre-posed position. The null position refers to cases in which there are no supportive moves, while the bi-position means that supportive moves are employed both before and after the head act.

4. Results

The empirical findings relating to our research questions are presented in this sec-tion, and a more extended argument is provided in the Discussion section.

4.1 Shifts in strategy use

When request utterances are translated into English, statistically significant shifts in strategy use occur in Lin’s translation (p < .01), but not in Pratt & Chiang’s trans-lation (see Table 2). In addition, inter-group variance between the two translations does not reach the level of statistical significance.

The distributions of the three strategy types in the Chinese original and the two translations are presented in Table 3. Direct strategies occur most frequently in the original and in the translations, followed by conventionally-indirect strat-egies, while non-conventionally indirect strategies do not occur in our sample. Translation shifts in strategy use mainly take the form of Chinese direct requests


218 Vincent X. Wang

becoming conventionally-indirect requests in English. This type of shift was used 8.2 per cent more frequently by Lin than by Pratt & Chiang.

Examples (2) to (4) are examples of translation shifts in strategy use. The con-ventions for the examples in this paper are: utterances (a) are from the Chinese original, with gloss translation provided by the investigator; utterances (b) are Lin’s translations; and (c) are Pratt & Chiang’s translations.

(2) a. 女先生且罷論 ‘lady teacher just stop talking’ b. Will the lady teacher please stop a moment? [Lin] c. Stop it, lady teacher. [Pratt & Chiang]

(3) a. 請覓他遊。 ‘please look for somewhere else to visit’ b. You had better go away and visit some other place. [Lin] c. You ought to find another place to visit. [P&C]

(4) a. 奉屈暫居寒舍。 ‘condescend to stay temporarily at my shabby home’ b. You could put up at our home. [Lin] c. May I humbly offer you lodging in our poor home? [P&C]

Table 2. Chi-square tests for inter-group variances in strategy use between the original and the translations

X2 N df p

Original vs. Lin 7.090 177 1 .008**

Original vs. Pratt & Chiang 2.532 185 1 .112

Lin vs. Pratt & Chiang 1.229 174 1 .268

** p < .01

Table 3. Strategy types in the Chinese original and the English translations

Original Lin Pratt & Chiang

Direct

n 71 47 59

% 75.5% 56.6% 64.8%

Conventionally-indirect

n 23 36 32

% 24.5% 43.4% 35.2%

Total

n 94 83 91

% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0%



Imperatives are used in the Chinese originals (2a), (3a) and (4a). These are a type of direct strategy: imperative verbs are 罷論 balun ‘stop talking’ in (2a), 覓 mi ‘look for’ in (3a), and居 ju ‘live in’ or ‘stay at’ in (4a), and the strategy type of the ut-terances is Mode Derivable (cf. Table 1). Lin’s translations (2b), (3b) and (4b) of these utterances shift to conventionally-indirect strategies. In (2b), Will the lady…?, the speaker inquires whether the hearer is going to, or is willing to, stop talking, a Query Preparatory strategy. In (3b) You had better… is a common ex-pression for making suggestions — Suggestive Formula — in conventionally-indirect strategies. The Suggestive Formula strategy is also used in you could… in (4b). Unlike Lin, Pratt & Chiang retain direct strategies in (2c) stop it [Mode Derivable] and (3c) you ought to [Obligation Statement]. They shift to the conventionally-indirect strategy of Query Preparatory with May I … in (4c).

These findings can be examined in conjunction with the results of previous cross-cultural pragmatic studies, which show that Chinese speakers prefer more direct request strategies in their L1 and L2 than English speakers do (Kasper 1995; Lee-Wong 1994; Yu 1999, 1999). With the knowledge that different levels of di-rectness are preferred by Chinese and English speakers, some translators, like Lin, may be motivated to replace some direct strategies in the Chinese original with conventionally-indirect strategies in English in order to conform to the conven-tions of target-text readers.

4.2 Internal modifications

We now examine pragmatic behaviour in relation to internal modifications by comparing the original with its translations. In the present sample the Chinese text shows a relatively well developed repertoire of lexical items for expressing high levels of deference, but very few instances of syntactic modifications. One of the most plausible reasons for such a heavy reliance on lexical means lies in the fact that the Chinese language offers only limited syntactic devices for modifying utterances: Chinese verbs do not inflect with tense, aspect, voice and mood, let alone conditional and subjunctive modes, whereas English verbs do.

Three strategies emerge from Lin’s and Pratt & Chiang’s treatment of Chinese lexical modifications in their translations: (a) shifting to syntactic modifications in the target language, (b) retaining lexical modifications in English, and (c) non-translation. A considerable number of lexical mitigations are replaced by syntactic modifications in the two translations. For example, in (5), Yün wants her husband, Shen Fu, to try stinking bean-curd, a type of food he has long avoided. Her request is mitigated with lexical items of respect and deference: 屈 qu (roughly meaning ‘condescendingly’) and 君 jun (an honorific term for ‘you’). These lexical items are so specific to the Chinese language that the translators did not appear to strive for


220 Vincent X. Wang

lexical equivalents in English, but rather shifted to employing a syntactic structure Why don’t you, an English formulaic structure for making suggestions. By using Why don’t you in (5b) and (5c) Lin and Pratt & Chiang turned the imperative in (5a) into a question using the Suggestive Formula strategy. In this case, the politeness that was originally expressed in the Chinese lexical items is conveyed syntactically.

(5) a. 屈君試嘗之 ‘condescendingly you please try to taste it’ b. Why don’t you try […] one? c. Why don’t you try it?

Secondly, the translators also retain Chinese lexical mitigations by using English lexical modifications. In (6) to (8) the Chinese utterances are mitigated by lexical means, and lexical modifications are also used in the translations: 幸 xing (a term of respect) in (6a) is translated using the polite lexical terms Mayst thou by Lin in (6b), and Blessed spirit by Pratt & Chiang in (6c). 且 qie in (7a) and 姑 gu in (8a) are translated into just in (7b) and (8c), roughly their English equivalent.

(6) a. 幸神憐佑！ ‘respectful spirit protect [me]!’ b. Mayst thou protect me! c. Blessed spirit, protect me.

(7) a. 公且避出 ‘you just step out’ b. You just get away for a moment. c. If you will step aside.

(8) a. 姑勿問。 ‘Don’t ask now’ b. Don’t ask me questions. c. Just a moment.

Thirdly, there are instances in which the translators opted not to translate the Chi-nese lexical modifications. By adding 一 yi ‘a’ to form 一彈 yi tan ‘play [the instru-ment] for a while’ in (9a), the speaker sounds more friendly, informal and tentative than they would by saying 彈 tan ‘play’ alone. This use of 一 yi is a special Chinese feature, which is not given in the two translations (9b) and (9c):

(9) a. 到彼一彈何如？ ‘How about going there to play a while?’ b. How about going there and playing it for us? c. How about him playing for us when we get there?

Using appropriate and respectful names to address the hearer is another common and important way of establishing social rapport and showing politeness, particu-larly for Chinese speakers. However, the respectful Chinese terms of address are often so culture-specific that they do not have any real equivalents in culturally-distant languages such as English.



(10) a. 足下設榻於寺中，何如？ ‘Thou, how about lodging at the temple?’ b. How about putting up there? c. Why not put up at the temple?

In our sample utterances, the sophisticated address terms in the Chinese original are frequently lost in translation. Deferential address terms such as 公 gong in (7a), 足下 zuxia in (10a), 君 jun in (5a) and 卿 qing are either omitted or simplified as the plain and unmarked you in the two English translations.

4.3 Formulaic expressions

In our sample, request formulae are found to play a crucial role in formulating requests in both the original and the translations. In the Chinese text the most fre-quently used request formulae include: 盍 he ‘why [not]…’ (n = 8), 速 su ‘quickly’ (n = 7), 宜 yi ‘[you] had better’(n = 5), (請)勿 (qing) wu ‘(please) don’t…’ (n = 7), and …何如 heru ‘what about…’ (n = 4). Examples (11) to (13) demonstrate the use of 盍 he, 宜 yi and …何如 heru respectively, with their English translations:

(11) a. 盍偕我作嶺南遊？ ‘Why don’t you accompany me to visit Lingnan?’ b. Why don’t you come along with me to Lingnan? c. […] why not go with me to South-of-the-Mountain?

(12) a. 宜密囑姚托言思家 ‘[you] had better secretly tell Yao to …’ b. […] you should secretly suggest to Yao to […] c. […] you should secretly order Yao to […]

(13) a. […] 伴我何如？ ‘What about accompanying me?’ b. […] why not stay on and keep me company? c. […] why not keep me company?

Like the Chinese originals, the English translations of these requests show a high incidence of formulae. Both Lin and Pratt & Chiang made frequent use of six for-mulae, with no fewer than four tokens each (see Table 4). Three of the six formulae are identical in Lin’s and Pratt & Chiang’s translations: you vp, why don’t you/we, and you should. The other three are used by one translator and not the other.

The translators, like the original author, rely heavily on formulae to reproduce request utterances. In this case, there is no shift in the importance of formulae between the original and the translations. Furthermore, there may be a common repertoire of formulae that translators usually draw upon — e.g. the three most frequently used formulae in Table 4 — although individual variations occur on the basis of personal preference and style. This working hypothesis deserves to be tested in future corpus-based translation studies, since our sample is too small to allow generalised conclusions.


222 Vincent X. Wang

Close examination of our data shows that the translators did not simply trans-late a given Chinese formulaic expression with one formulaic equivalent in Eng-lish. The correspondence between Chinese and English formulae is far from one-to-one, but is often one to multiples. For example, the utterances that use 盍 he are translated by Lin and Pratt & Chiang into three formulae — why don’t you/we (n = 9), we can/could (n = 1), and why not vp (n = 4); while requests that use the for-mulaic 宜 yi are translated using five formulae: you should (n = 5), you must (n = 2), you had better (n = 1), I think you should (n = 1), and you vp (n = 1) .

4.4 External modifications: information sequencing

Our data show that the distributions of the four types of information sequencing are very similar in the original and the translations. The most favoured position is the pre-posed, followed by the post-posed and the bi-position, while the null posi-tion is employed least commonly (see Table 5). There are no statistically significant shifts in terms of the positions of supportive moves between the Chinese original and the two translations (p > .05).

Lin shows a tendency to shift some requests from the pre-posed to the post-posted position, although these shifts do not reach the level of statistical signifi-cance: χ2 (3, N = 178) = 2.928, p = .403. Unlike Lin, Pratt & Chiang closely follow the original in terms of information sequencing. For example, the Chinese origi-nal (14a) is in a pre-posed position (supportive moves are underlined to high-light their position in relation to the head act), Lin’s translation (14b) shifts to the post-posed position, and Pratt & Chiang retain the pre-posed position in (14c). In (15), both Lin (15b) and Pratt & Chiang (15c) shift the supportive move from its original pre-posed to the post-posted position.

Table 4. Occurrence frequencies of the most frequently used formulae (n ≥ 4) by Lin, and by Pratt & Chiang

Lin Pratt & Chiang

you vp 9 7why don’t you/we 6 7you should 4 7will you 5 1you can/could 5 0you must 4 2why not vp 3 4we can/could 1 4I would vp 0 4



(14) a. 無人調護，自去經心 ‘nobody [will] look after you, take good care [of yourself] after you leave.’

b. Take good care of yourself, for there will be no one to look after you. c. There will be no one there to look after you. Please take good care of

yourself.

(15) a. 來遲罰三杯！ ‘[For] being late, [you are] penalised three cups.’ b. You must be penalised three cups for coming late! c. You are fined three cups of wine for coming late.

In (14a), (14c) and (15a) the supportive moves are in the pre-posed position — i.e. the speaker provides information to justify his/her request before making the request, using what Kirkpatrick calls the ‘because-therefore’ pattern (Kirkpatrick 1991, 1992). The English translations (14b), (15b) and (15c) shift the supportive moves to the post-posed position: The speaker first makes the request, and then justifies it with supportive moves, using the ‘therefore-because’ pattern. Kirkpatrick (1991, 1992) and Scollon and Scollon (1991) suggest that the ‘because-therefore’ pattern is preferred by Chinese speakers, whereas the ‘therefore-because’ pattern is favoured by English speakers. In our sample the shifts in information sequenc-ing in the two translations are not statistically significant, although Lin does shift

Table 5. Distributions of the four types of information sequencing in the original and the translations

Original Lin Pratt & Chiang

pre-posed position

n 51 36 47

% 54.3% 42.9% 51.6%

post-posed position

n 18 24 22

% 19.1% 28.6% 24.2%

bi-position

n 14 13 13

% 14.9% 15.5% 14.3%

null position

n 11 11 9

% 11.7% 13.1% 9.9%

Total

n 94 84 91

% 100% 100% 100%


224 Vincent X. Wang

some utterances of the ‘because-therefore’ type to the ‘therefore-because’ pattern. In this case, Lin’s translation moves to some extent towards the English pattern of information sequencing, whereas Pratt & Chiang preserve the ‘because-therefore’ pattern that is predominantly used in Chinese.

5. Discussion

The present investigation does not seek to determine which of the two transla-tions is superior, but rather to describe what the translators in question do in their renditions of given speech acts, with particular emphasis on translation shifts. Our sample reveals that different aspects of speech act behaviour do not show the same tendency towards translation shifts: lexical modifications are most prone to shifts, while (in)directness in strategy use shows moderate to significant shifts depending on the individual translator’s preference. Those aspects that are least likely to shift are information sequencing and reliance on speech act formulae.

5.1 Translation shifts caused by linguistic constraints

The linguistic constraints of English and Chinese undoubtedly lead to certain types of translation shifts in request behaviour. Jakobson (1959/2000) comments on the effect of linguistic constraints on translation: “If some grammatical category is absent in a given language, its meaning may be translated into this language by lexical means”. Jakobson’s observation remains valid when applied to the situation of translating from English into Chinese, where syntactic properties such as verb inflections are present in English but absent in Chinese. English verb inflections such as conditionals (e.g., could or would) that express politeness and coerciveness tend to be rendered as polite lexical items in Chinese. This demonstrates a transla-tion shift from morphosyntactically marked politeness to lexically expressed po-liteness. However, the present study focuses on translation from Chinese to Eng-lish — i.e. from an inflection-absent language to an inflection-present language — a situation that Jakobson does not discuss. We have seen that both Lin and Pratt & Chiang tend to utilise shifts from lexically-realised internal modifications in the original text to syntactically-expressed deference in the target text. Shen Fu’s use of sophisticated lexical terms of politeness — e.g. highly developed address terms or terms expressing respect and deference that do not really have lexical equivalents in English — is compensated for by the use of syntactic devices (e.g. conditionals) in the two translations. Such a finding complements Jakobson’s observations.



5.2 Translation shifts at the translator’s discretion

In addition, translators at times make use of translation shifts when there are no obvious linguistic reasons for doing so. In our sample, both Lin and Pratt & Chiang shift from rather direct requests in the original to more indirect requests in their translations. It is plausible to assume that such shifts are the translators’ choice, since linguistically direct requests can be perfectly formulated in English. Lin uses comparatively more translation shifts than Pratt & Chiang in rendering request behaviour, both in directness and in information sequencing. This merits further examination in light of the historical context in which the translators worked, their concepts of translation, and the intended objectives of their translations.

Lin Yutang1 (1895–1976), a western-trained Chinese intellectual, translated Fusheng Liuji at a time when China was lagging behind western nations scientifi-cally, militarily and democratically. At that time, there was a vast influx of western schools of thought and ideas into China. This led Chinese intellectuals to seri-ously reevaluate Chinese culture, and some became highly critical of traditional Chinese values. There was also a considerable imbalance between translation into Chinese and translation from Chinese at this time. A wide array of schools of western thought, philosophies and literary and scientific works was available to Chinese readers in translation, but only a limited number of Chinese works was made available in western languages (He 2006). Lin Yutang was well positioned to deliver useful translated works in such a situation. He was one of a small number of Chinese scholars with a strong command of English. He wrote and translated prolifically and provocatively, and became a leading interpreter and critic of China (Chan 1947). Lin’s translation of Fusheng Liuji first appeared in T’ien Hsia Monthly — a high-quality English scholarly journal published in China. This journal, spon-sored by the Sun Yat-Sen Institute for the Advancement of Culture and Education, aimed to interpret China to the world (Howell 1936), something also very close to Lin’s heart. Lin’s relatively more liberal approach to translation, in comparison to that of Pratt & Chiang, needs to be appreciated in the context of the 1930s. At this point China was a lesser power, and the Chinese language was considered to have lower status than major European languages (He 2006). Lin endeavoured to interpret China through his writing and translation so that Chinese culture would be better known and more highly regarded in the world. When telling the story of Shen Fu, Lin needed to communicate effectively with his western readers, who were largely unfamiliar with Chinese culture. Against this historical backdrop, it was both reasonable and sensible for Lin to employ a reader-oriented approach to translation.

Such an approach is also consistent with Lin’s concept of translation. In ‘On translation’, Lin (1940/1991) explains his credos of translating and his preferred


226 Vincent X. Wang

approach to translation. He believes that word-for-word translation is inferior to translation that grasps and represents the spirit of the original. In his preface to his translation of Six Chapters of a Floating Life (Shen 1999), Lin states that he has been planning for some time to spread the story of Yün: “I am translating her story just because it is a story that should be told to the world” (1940/1991: 20). For Lin, the couple’s quiet life, their happiness despite hardship, and their search for beauty represent “the essence of a Chinese way of life” (1940/1991: 21). Lin captures the spirit of the Chinese original with its elegant, expressive, and idiomatic English (Dong 2002; Li 2007). Lin achieves a freer translation at word level — e.g., he tends to render culture-laden items in the Chinese original into English idioms or set ex-pressions that are appropriate in the given context, and not necessarily word-for-word equivalents (Birch 1961). When translating Chinese requests, Lin does not faithfully replicate the original request patterns, but rather shifts to conventional English request behaviour — significantly in terms of strategy use, and moderately in information sequencing. Lin’s translation employs significant shifts from direct to conventionally-indirect strategies compared to that of Pratt & Chiang. An im-mediate advantage of these shifts in Lin’s translation is that the characters do not behave in a manner that appears too direct, coercive or abrupt to English readers, who are accustomed to a higher level of indirectness. However, it should be noted that the Chinese flavour of the direct requests is lost to some extent in Lin’s transla-tion. To some degree, Lin employed the strategy of ‘domestication,’ to use Venuti’s (1995) term, by moving closer to target readers. This finding lends empirical sup-port to Venuti’s (2004) claim that translation inevitably marks the ‘inscription’ of the receiving cultural norms, and partly loses the cultural, ideological and social propositions of the original. In his words, “Can a translation ever communicate to its readers the understanding of the foreign text that the foreign readers have? Yes, I want to argue, but this communication will always be partial, both incomplete and inevitably slanted towards the domestic scene” (2004: 487). This is more evi-dent in Lin’s case than in Pratt & Chiang’s.

Pratt2 & Chiang3 translated Fusheng Liuji in the early 1980s. This was a time when China had begun to pursue an open-door policy, and when Chinese culture and many aspects of Chinese society had become increasingly accessible to the outside world through translated works, travel, diplomatic and commercial ex-change, and media sources such as news, documentaries, and popular films. Pratt & Chiang translated for the Penguin Classics, one of the most widely available series of international literature. Pratt & Chiang’s Six Records of a Floating Life is the third Chinese title in this series, after The Story of the Stone translated by David Hawkes (1973) and Poems by Li Bai and Du Fu translated by Arthur Coo-per (1973). Penguin’s translations of Chinese literature at this time were mainly a western initiative, and were motivated by a genuine interest in Chinese literary



works. The cultural knowledge of the readership, the status of Chinese language and culture, and the aim of the translation had thus changed considerably since Lin’s time. Other Chinese literary works in the Penguin Classics series include Confucius’s teachings, The Book of Chuang Tzu, The Art of War, Buddhist Scrip-tures, several Qing novels, and modern Chinese fiction by Qian Zhongshu, Lu Xun and Eileen Chang.

In contrast to Lin, Pratt & Chiang seek to retain the Chinese form in request behaviour where possible. They explain their concept of translation based on the translation principle outlined by Anthony C. Yu (余囯藩) “[to seek] the most intel-ligible fidelity to the original” (Shen 1983: Introduction). Yu is an eminent transla-tor, best known for his four-volume translation of The Journey to the West (1977), published by University of Chicago Press. Like Yu, Hawkes, who translated The Story of the Stone (1973), has been praised for his faithful rendition of the original (Yang 1980). Fidelity seems to have been a valued and highly sought quality in the translations of this period. Pratt & Chiang attempt to attain ‘intelligible fidelity’ by drawing English readers closer to the context of Shen Fu’s story. They provide detailed and extensive background information, including 105 notes, a chronol-ogy of Shen Fu, Chinese weights and measures, maps and so on. Pratt & Chiang further explain their views and approach to translation:

we felt that there was room for a full translation of the Six Records into modern English which would — by the use of extensive but, we hope, not intrusive notes and maps — present to the modern English readers a more complete exposition of the tale Shen Fu told. […] We hope that our contribution to this work may help it to live in the minds of today’s Western readers, as its author intended it should live in the minds of his contemporaries (Shen 1983: Introduction).

Unlike Lin, Pratt & Chiang generally retain the directness of the original requests, in line with their stated concept of and approach to translation. Pratt & Chiang tend to preserve particular Chinese features at word level (Wei 2005) and at a pragmatic level, close to what Venuti calls the strategy of ‘foreignisation’. This en-ables English readers to experience the Chinese use of direct strategies, and to appreciate, in meaningful and vivid contexts, that direct requests can be a useful means for Chinese speakers to solicit closeness, in-groupness, or intimacy. In the Chinese original, the married couple and close friends commonly favour direct-ness in their requests: In (2a) Shen Fu addresses Yün directly but lovingly; in (14a) Yün’s request to her husband sounds direct but very caring; and in (4a) a close friend of Shen Fu makes a request of him earnestly and directly.

The translations by Lin and Pratt & Chiang therefore demonstrate two ap-proaches to dealing with cross-linguistic differences in norms and conventions of speech act behaviour. Lin mitigates the heavily culture-laden elements by


228 Vincent X. Wang

providing readers with a smoother, more easily intelligible and culturally closer translation; whereas Pratt & Chiang preserve the flavour of the original by resist-ing extensive translation shifts, in the knowledge that the translation may sound culturally foreign to receptor-language readers. It is also useful here to relate the translators’ approach to translation to their historical and social contexts — as suggested in the framework by Lambert and Gorp (1985) — in the context of the present investigation. This allows a range of key factors, such as the social and historical background, translators’ motivations and concept of translation, the readership, and the power and status of the languages involved, to be addressed and incorporated to create a more comprehensive understanding of the transla-tion phenomena under investigation.

5.3 Methodology: Tools of cross-cultural pragmatics in translation studies

The analytical tools borrowed from cross-cultural pragmatics appear to have been useful in this descriptive translation study, in allowing various aspects of request realisation patterns to be described systematically and revealingly. These descrip-tions provide a sound basis for a subsequent comparison of the original and the translations for the purpose of determining translation shifts and translation norms. The two major elements in our description of request behaviour are strat-egy use and request formulae.

Strategy use is an aspect of speech act behaviour that has been extensively researched in cross-cultural pragmatics. In the present study direct requests are most frequently used in the Chinese original. Such direct requests promote the hearer’s positive face — a sense of belonging to a group of close and frank mem-bers. This lends support to our earlier hypothesis that directness in requests is a characteristic of Fusheng Liuji, as it is of Hong Lou Meng.

Formulae represent another important aspect of speech act behaviour. They are essential constituents of speech act utterances, although they have not been as extensively examined in cross-cultural pragmatics as strategy use. Our rather small sample of ninety four shows that formulae play a crucial role in speech act formulation in both source and target texts. This should encourage subsequent examinations of formulae use for speech act realisation in larger samples, and in samples from a wide range of genres, including literature, business materials, and legal documents. Corpus-based investigations — a recent and rising trend — are particularly appropriate in this case, since concordancing based on a corpus can efficiently search, tally, and draw distributions of formulae, which are recurrent and highly context-bound. Subsequent corpus-based translation studies, which use either parallel or comparative corpora (Malmkjaer 1998; Mauranen 2002; Olo-han 2004), can aim to reveal which formulae are frequently used to realise a given



speech act in the source and target languages, and in what types of text, as well as whether any regularities or patterns emerge in relation to formulae translation. The results may help to uncover translation norms that can be of practical value for translator training and machine translation.

6. Conclusion

The present study set out to describe two English translations of a classic Chinese work by focusing on request behaviour. A series of analytical tools borrowed from cross-cultural pragmatics showed the value of capturing various aspects of request behaviour systematically. Statistically, Lin shifts a significant proportion of direct strategies to conventionally-indirect strategies, while Pratt & Chiang do not make significant shifts of this kind. With regard to internal modifications, both Lin’s and Pratt & Chiang’s translations contain marked shifts from extensively lexis-based mitigations in the Chinese original to heavily syntactically-realised modifications in English. The two translations considered here also demonstrate frequent use of request formulae, as does the Chinese original. In addition, both Lin and Pratt & Chiang retain the preference for the ‘because-therefore’ pattern of informa-tion sequencing from the Chinese original, without making significant shifts to the ‘therefore-because’ pattern that English speakers generally prefer. There are notable variations in the request realisation patterns preferred by the individual translators: Lin invokes greater shifts than Pratt & Chiang, employing significant shifts in strategy use and moderate shifts in information sequencing.

The translators’ use of different approaches to translation was further exam-ined in a larger socio-historical context that incorporates a range of factors such as the historical moment when the translators worked, their objectives and con-cept of translation, and the status of the Chinese language at the time. We have shown that positioning translated works in such a context facilitates a more re-vealing analysis, and forms the basis for a more in-depth understanding of the act of translating, which echoes Toury’s (1995) idea that descriptive studies of trans-lation shifts contribute to “a form of discovery” (1995: 84), “a step towards the formulation of explanatory hypotheses [italics in original] about the practice of translation” (1995: 85). It is hoped that the specific information about pragmatic shifts in Chinese literary translation offered in the present study, which uncovers a particular aspect of the act of translating, will be of use to the much larger enter-prise of descriptive translation studies proposed by Toury (1995). It is also hoped that the innovative methodological applications used here will inform subsequent translation studies.


230 Vincent X. Wang

Notes

* The author is grateful to José Lambert and Kirsten Malmkjaer for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

1. Lin Yutang (林語堂) is a leading Chinese scholar who made a significant contribution to introducing and interpreting Chinese culture, philosophies and way of life to the West. Lin was educated at institutions run by Christian missions in China, undertook his postgraduate study at Harvard University, and earned his PhD in Philology from the University of Leipzig. He pub-lished several English bestsellers, including My Country and My People (1935), The Importance of Living (1937), and The Wisdom of Confucius (1938). Lin also translated Chinese literary mas-terpieces, such as Famous Chinese Short Stories Retold (1952) and Widow, Nun and Courtesan: Three Novelettes From the Chinese (1951).

2. Leonard Pratt (白倫) is an American media man. He studied Chinese at Michigan U, Colum-bia U, and in Taiwan, and worked as the director of the Hong Kong office of the ABC before join-ing CNBC in 1994. From 1997 he developed large projects in China, e.g., the Chinese version of the TV programme Sesame Street.

3. Chiang Su-Hui (江素惠) was born in Taiwan, where she also received her tertiary training. She is an influential reporter in Taiwan and China, and has directed several news agencies and offices.

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234 Vincent X. Wang

Résumé

La présente étude porte sur les glissements traductifs dans deux traductions anglaises de l’oeuvre chinoise Fusheng Liuji. Elle emprunte des techniques analytiques à la pragmatique des relations interculturelles en vue d’une description systématique de l’acte de langage dans l’original et dans les traductions. En comparaison avec Pratt & Chiang, qui suivent de près les options pragmati-ques de l’original, Lin recourt à des glissements traductifs plus manifestes : — ils sont significatifs sur le plan stratégique, et modérés dans les informations séquentielles . Les traducteurs ainsi que l’auteur de l’original recourent souvent à des formules de demande. Les deux traductions per-mettent d’observer en outre des glissements marqués — dans les demandes — du niveau lexical au niveau syntaxique. L’article analyse en outre l’approche traductive en termes de conception de la traduction ainsi que dans son contexte historique et social.

Mots-clefs : glissement traductif, pragamatique des relations interculturelles, normes traductives, demandes, discours stéréotypé, littérature chinoise

Author’s address

Vincent X. Wang, PhDAssistant ProfessorDepartment of EnglishFaculty of Social Sciences and HumanitiesThe University of MacauAv. Padre Tomás PereiraTaipaMacau

[email protected]

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