Patronage and ideology: A corpus-assisted investigation of Eileen Chang’s style of translating herself and the other

Abstract

Abstract Eileen Chang, a Chinese literary giant, was also a translator who translated both herself and other novelists. This study investigates Chang’s translator style by examining her Chinese translations of two successful English novels, The Rice-Sprout Song written by herself and The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, adopting a corpus-assisted approach, supplemented with some qualitative analysis. Significant differences were found in Chang’s translations of these two novels. Chang’s self-translation was found to be close to her style of creative Chinese writing, though not without exception. It was further found that emotional particles and a Chinese conjunction ‘yinwei’ served as Chang’s approach to render her mannerism. The hallmarks of Chang’s translations could be traced to her own views on literature and translation alongside the ideological and socio-cultural motivations in her times.