Alice’s Travels in the Chinese Language: The Role of the Translator in Translating Children’s Literature

Abstract

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Alice, hereafter), a classic children’s story, was written by Lewis Carroll in 1865. In the original work, Alice, the protagonist, is a curious, brave, assertive and independent-minded child, and her adventurous journey symbolizes a metamorphosis of her image, from being weak and submissive to becoming powerful and independent. Alice first appeared in the Chinese-speaking world (i.e. the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and the Chinese-speaking population of Singapore and Malaysia) in 1922 through its Chinese translation by the famous linguist and translator Chao Yuen-Ren. For 93 years since then, Alice’s image has been traveling unceasingly to these localities. During her travels, her image has taken various forms, each in a different Chinese translation at a given time and place. Adult-translators, who construct these various images, play pivotal roles in the translation process.

The present thesis adopts Edward Said’s ‘four stages of a travel’ and ‘history and situation’ as its theoretical frameworks. It also integrates insights from the “Self-Other” dynamic, a core concept in Imagology. From this integration, an idea of the child image is derived that not only is by nature a product subject to historical and situational conditions, but also evolves from the ‘Self-Other’ dynamic as the image of the child ‘Other’ constructed by the adult ‘Self’. Under this framework, the thesis first identified 338 Chinese translations of Alice produced between 1922 and 2014, analyzed their features and interpreted their underlying rationales, and provided an account of Alice’s travels by dividing them into two categories composed of five routes in four of the Chinese-speaking regions. After this first factual analysis, investigations of the six selected translations were conducted. In-depth discussions were made on the strategies and methods employed by the translators, who can be more specifically described as ‘adult-translators’, in their construction of the image of Alice, as well as the influence exerted on adult-translators by other participants in the translation process, e.g. the publishers, illustrators, authors of prefaces and so on.