{"title":"Gender characterization in Lady Windermere’s Fan and its Chinese translations: A corpus stylistic approach","authors":"Yifan Zhu","doi":"10.1177/09639470241292813","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This study examines gender representation in Oscar Wilde’s comedy and satire, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), using corpus stylistic analysis. Specifically, it analyzes gender characterization patterns in the original drama and explores how these patterns shift in two Chinese translations: Shen Xingren’s translation in 1918 and Hong Shen’s translation in 1923. By analyzing keyword patterns, collocational patterns, and characterization cues, the study reveals the intricate nature of gender characterization in the source text. Subsequently, a comparison is made between the textual patterns of the source text and their manifestations in the translations. The findings indicate that while Shen Xingren’s translation quite faithfully (re)represents the gender images and relations of the source text, Hong Shen’s selective appropriation of women and men characterization in his translation not only suppresses the source text’s potential to challenge moral absolutism towards women but also undermines the voices of women present in the original text. The article suggests that the re-representation or shifts in gender characterization observed between the source and target texts can be attributed to the translator’s ideology and adherence to particular poetics.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"64 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6000,"publicationDate":"2024-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Language and Literature","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470241292813","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This study examines gender representation in Oscar Wilde’s comedy and satire, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), using corpus stylistic analysis. Specifically, it analyzes gender characterization patterns in the original drama and explores how these patterns shift in two Chinese translations: Shen Xingren’s translation in 1918 and Hong Shen’s translation in 1923. By analyzing keyword patterns, collocational patterns, and characterization cues, the study reveals the intricate nature of gender characterization in the source text. Subsequently, a comparison is made between the textual patterns of the source text and their manifestations in the translations. The findings indicate that while Shen Xingren’s translation quite faithfully (re)represents the gender images and relations of the source text, Hong Shen’s selective appropriation of women and men characterization in his translation not only suppresses the source text’s potential to challenge moral absolutism towards women but also undermines the voices of women present in the original text. The article suggests that the re-representation or shifts in gender characterization observed between the source and target texts can be attributed to the translator’s ideology and adherence to particular poetics.
期刊介绍:
Language and Literature is an invaluable international peer-reviewed journal that covers the latest research in stylistics, defined as the study of style in literary and non-literary language. We publish theoretical, empirical and experimental research that aims to make a contribution to our understanding of style and its effects on readers. Topics covered by the journal include (but are not limited to) the following: the stylistic analysis of literary and non-literary texts, cognitive approaches to text comprehension, corpus and computational stylistics, the stylistic investigation of multimodal texts, pedagogical stylistics, the reading process, software development for stylistics, and real-world applications for stylistic analysis. We welcome articles that investigate the relationship between stylistics and other areas of linguistics, such as text linguistics, sociolinguistics and translation studies. We also encourage interdisciplinary submissions that explore the connections between stylistics and such cognate subjects and disciplines as psychology, literary studies, narratology, computer science and neuroscience. Language and Literature is essential reading for academics, teachers and students working in stylistics and related areas of language and literary studies.