AustLit

'Avenue of Eternal Peace is an early novel written by Australian novelist Nicholas Jose. Set completely in China, the novel presents a panoramic description of a foreign culture with which the author has been closely associated. In that sense, it is Jose’s first "trans-cultural" novel. Jose claims that the novel represents an attempt on his part as an Australian writer to translate China. Indeed, Avenue of Eternal Peace offers a fascinating translation of Chinese culture. To Jose, cultural translation is different from interlingual translation because it all happens intralingually: it integrates the author’s understanding of the source culture and expression of it in the same process. In so doing Jose shapes his knowledge of a foreign culture through his own language and directly presents it to members of his own culture. This essay first looks into the contents of the Chinese culture in Jose’s translation. Employing what Raymond Williams refers to as the "three levels of culture", namely, the lived culture, the recorded culture and the culture of selective tradition, it then examines Jose’s translation strategies and offers a discussion of the underlying reasons. It concludes that the way in which Jose translates China in his early "trans-cultural" novels betrays a lot of affinities with what Bill Ashcroft calls the "transnational" writing in some postcolonial discourse.

'《长安街》是澳大利亚小说家尼古拉斯·周思早期创作的一部中国题材小说,也是他积极践行的一部"跨文化书写"小说。在这部作品中,周思立足澳大利亚对中国进行了多方位的文化解读。周思把"跨文化书写"看做是一种文化翻译,《长安街》中的文化翻译不同于普通意义上的文字翻译,因为它将作者对中国文化的理解和向西方读者的表达合二为一,努力传达小说家对于中国文化的认识。本文立足澳大利亚理论家比尔·阿希克罗夫特的后殖民文学理论,借用雷蒙德·威廉斯的三级文化分类法,从"亲历文化"、"纪录文化"和"选择性的传统文化"三个方面考察《长安街》对于中国文化的翻译策略、方法和视角,从中观察周思早期中国小说的特点以及这种"跨文化书写"中所反映出的后殖民话语特征'

Source: CAOD.