The dramatization of characterization in the literary translations of the 1910s in China: a case study of Zhou Shoujuan’s translations of Western fiction

Zhou Shoujuan 周瘦鵑 (1895−1968), generally labelled as one of the hard-core members of the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School”—an (in)famous literary school in contemporary China—was also an influential and prolific translator of Western fiction in China from 1911 to 1947. During his translation career spanning nearly four decades, he produced altogether 459 translations, whose genres range from news, biography, drama, poetry, and fiction. In terms of the total amount of translation, he is second only to Lin Shu—his contemporary translator who was famous for translating a large number of foreign literary texts into classical Chinese despite his lack of knowledge of any foreign language. Similar to Lin, most of Zhou’s translations are fiction (including novels and short stories), accounting for 82% of his translation oeuvre. The present study focuses on the means of characterization as revealed in Zhou’s fiction translations during the 1910s. By largely drawing on Ewen’s narrative framework on characterization, the study explores how the two major methods of portraying characters—direct definition and indirect definition (with the latter subsuming such categories as descriptions of action, speech, external appearance, and thoughts)—are represented in Zhou’s early translations. It is found that except for psychological description, all other means of characterization evince an expansive trend in his translations, which cumulatively lead to a dramatization tendency of original characters. By juxtaposing Zhou’s translation practice with the narrative convention of the receptive literary system, this chapter points out that the elaborate and dramatic method of presentation, which is inherent in the storytelling mode of the Chinese vernacular fiction, may be the most influential factor that impacts Zhou’s translation strategy.