民族志文化翻译与赛珍珠的中国知识体系建构

Ethnographic Translation of Culture and Pearl S.Buck s Knowledge Construction of China

从跨学科视角看,赛珍珠“大众中国通”的权威地位得益于她采用民族志意义上的“文化翻译”,以小说为载体将中国文化作为整体文本译介给西方读者。她将中国人对文化的自我阐释,形象化为人物刻画,将她自己对中国文化的再阐释转化为故事情节,让中国文化以自身逻辑在时代语境中演绎,比人类学的文化翻译更加灵动也更有说服力,而且因为故事涉及人物语言的摹写,她比人类学家又多了语言层面的微观文化翻译,保证了中国知识体系疏密有致的稳定性。

From the interdisciplinary perspective,Pearl S.Buck s authority as a“popular sinologist”lies in her cultural translation in the sense of ethnography and presenting the Chinese culture as a whole in the form of fictions to Western readers.She translated Chinese interpretation of their own culture into characterization and her re-interpretation into plot development that Chinese culture could evolve with its own logic in the new context and her interpretation be more convincing than ethnographic cultural translations.As plot development involved transcription of human language,she could outdo ethnographers in micro-cultural translation at the language level,assuring the stability of Chinese knowledge system.