Translator’s narrative intervention in the English translation of Jin Yong’s The Legend of Condor Heroes

ABSTRACT

The success of the English translation of Jin Yong's martial arts novel The Legend of Condor Heroes ('LCH') has challenged the view that Jin's works are untranslatable, demanding new scholarly interpretations. With a corpus-aided approach, this paper investigates the translator's narrative intervention based on the omissions in LCH's English translation. This study demonstrates an average omission rate of 21.1%, with most omitted content falling into three categories, namely, historical-cultural information, fighting-scene information, and character-perception information. The omissions have reshaped LCH's narrative structure with the removal of actions at the story level, the shortening of narrative time at the narrative level, and the transformation of consciousness presentation and the reduction of narratorial interference at the narration level. Such intervention is aimed at resolving the conflicts of narrative norms between the source and target cultures. By following the target narrative norms, the translator has turned LCH into a fast-paced modern-looking English fantasy, which may be one of the reasons for its success. This finding reaffirms that adherence to target norms is conducive to the acceptance of translations of martial arts novels.

KEYWORDS:

• Translator’s narrative intervention
• narrative norms
• The Legend of Condor Heroes
• Jin Yong
• corpus-aided approach
• martial arts novel

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lin Chen

Lin Chen is a PhD student in the School of Foreign Languages at Southwest Jiaotong University (SWJTU). His main research area is translation studies, with a current focus on the English translation of Chinese literature. Chen has a BA in English literature and MA in translation and interpretation from SWJTU.

Ruoyu Dai

Ruoyu Dai is Associate Professor of the School of Foreign Languages at SWJTU. He is currently doing a PhD in Medio-translatology at the same department. Dai has a MA in English language and literature from Sichuan International Studies University. His main research areas include medio-translatology and translation theories.