Translation Processes and Cultural Critique in My Annotated Chinese Translation of Huckleberry Finn

Abstract

My annotated Chinese translation of Huckleberry Finn,《赫克歷險記》, published in 2012 by Linkingbooks Taiwan under a governmental grant, is based on the authoritative scholarly edition published by the University of California, Berkeley, with the restored Raftsmen Passage. 1 This new edition is the result of collaborative efforts by many Mark Twain scholars who used the "lost-and-found" manuscripts to revise the 1885 edition. I am grateful to the American Institute in Taiwan for having contacted UC Berkeley Press to give me permission to use both text and illustrations of this new edition. 2 For that reason, I am quite proud to say that my translation of Huckleberry Finn is so far the most complete in the Chinese language, 3 with one hundred and eighty-seven illustrations in total, 4 three hundred and eighty-seven annotated footnotes, and a Critical Introduction to the book's reception history and scholarship. 5 Mark Twain spent seven years writing the book, and I spent seven years translating and annotating the book. In what follows, I would like to share my experience both of the translation process and strategy and of teaching American literature in Taiwan for more than thirty years; my contribution to Mark Twain studies; and an interpretation of my translation of the book as a cultural critique or Menippean satire. Inspiration from Te-hsing Shan 單德興I was greatly inspired by Te-hsing Shan's annotated Chinese translation of Gulliver's Travels, 《格理弗遊記》, published in 2004. 6 Shan's method of translation is termed by Theo Hermans as a "thick translation" in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, where the translation "introduction and annotations outweigh the actual rendering of the novel." 7 I followed Shan's excellent model to do my translation of Huckleberry Finn, which was also a research project in the "Annotated Translation of

Translating African-American English into Chinese: A Case Study of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“…Even though lower-class characters are rarely portrayed using dialects, they are still depicted in nuanced and vivid ways in Chinese novels. The use of slang and idioms is largely responsible for creating this artistic effect [12].…”