Cultural Hybridity And The Translated Text: Re-Reading D. H. Lawrence In Chinese

This article begins by considering various aspects of hybridity – linguistic, generic and cultural – and then singles out hybridity as a defining feature of translated texts, as it is of many postmodern texts. Unlike the case of original works, hybridisation in translations must, however, be viewed in connection with the strategies of naturalisation (or acculturation) and foreignisation (or exoticisation) as deployed by translators. In fact, the greater the attempt at naturalisation, the more hybrid the text becomes. Key concepts in D. H. Lawrence’s “private religion”, as used in his major novels like Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, are then submitted to analysis, which is followed by a discussion of the problems they generate in translation. Among those terms used by Lawrence, many (like “soul”, “the Lord”, and “the Unseen”) have clearly been translated into Chinese with attendant Buddhist or folk religious connotations. The article ends by engaging itself with the reactions of readers to the “Babelic dissonance” in translations – that is, with the question of how they can make coherent sense of translated texts that are incurably hybrid.