1.2 Brief background information on the two translations and translators

This study focuses on two complete English translations of Sanguo Yanyi.These two translations are considered to be the most popular among Western readers (cf. France 2000: 232). The details of the two target texts(hereafter TTs) are provided below, with brief background information on each publication and translator.

Brewitt-Taylor's translation was first published in two volumes in Shanghai in 1925. It was reprinted in the United States by the Charles E. Tuttle Company in Rutland, Vermont in 1959 and simultaneously published in Tokyo. This translation was the first full English translation of any of the major traditional Chinese novels. In this translation, the old Wade-Giles System was used to translate proper names. The translation, which focuses more on the story itself, supplies no notes on historical circumstances, but it was written in fluent and somewhat archaic English.

Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor (1857—1938) was an Englishman. He came to China in his twenties and worked as an officer in the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs in a number of Chinese cities. He spent most of his adult life in China. In addition to a successful career as a customs official, he also achieved distinction as a scholar of Chinese. He was the first person to translate a full Chinese novel(i.e.Sanguo Yanyi)into English and became one of the pioneers who introduced this genre to the Englishspeaking world. In 2009, a biography of Brewitt-Taylor by Isidore Cyril Cannon was published in Hong Kong.This book,entitled Public Success, Private Sorrow,based on years of study and research,is“valuable reading for anyone studying the history of translation and the Western discovery of Chinese culture” (cf. Cannon 2009).

The translation by Roberts is the latest complete English translation. It uses the modern Pinyin name system. In addition to the text, the translator also provides eleven maps of important battles and numerous notes. Roberts also wrote a seventy-eight-page afterword, “About Three Kingdoms”, to discuss the backgrounds and possible themes of the novel.

Roberts was born in New York and is Professor of Chinese at New York University. He is a member of the Columbia University Oriental Thought and Research Institute,a director of the Journal of Asian Scholars and a member of the Oriental Research Society of America.

Due to the fact that the novel Sanguo Yanyi is lengthy—120 chapters divided into many separate stories—translators often choose only one or a few chapters to translate. According to Guo Yu (2008), “from the publication of P.P.Thomas's translation of The Death of the Celebrated Minister Tungcho in 1820 to the publication of Moss Roberts's unabridged translation of Three Kingdoms in 1994,seventeen different English translations,abridged or complete, have come into being in the past 170 years.” Even the translators of the two complete versions started with abridged versions.

Numerous articles have been published in Chinese journals on Roberts's translation of Sanguo Yanyi. These articles include reviews, comments on translation strategies and theoretical analyses, and a few relevant quotations and comments are mentioned here. Zhang Haoran (2001) is of the opinion that Roberts's translation “has a good choice of words as it relies on the context; also its images and characters have been fully reproduced and the style remains close to the original”. Zhang Haoran and Zhang Xijiu (2002) conclude that the translating techniques Roberts employed include literal translation, liberal translation, contextual amplification and annotation. He Xianbin (2003) argues that Moss Roberts's translation demonstrates that the polysystem theory cannot predict the strategies of an individual translator, and that English translations of Chinese works do not always have to be domesticated in order to gain acceptance among Western readers. Zhang Yu and Tian Cuiyun (2007) investigate the different approaches Roberts employed in trying to make his translation more fluent and natural.

A few papers that compare the two English translations also appeared in Chinese journals recently. Zhang Xiaohong (2007) introduces the idea of“translation purpose” from skopos theory and aims to demonstrate that the“purpose” affects the quality of the product by comparing the two English translations. Zhu Yuping (2008) compares the two English translations from a functionalist point of view. She finds that Brewitt-Taylor's translation has made many more changes from the original text in order to make the stories more interesting to read, while Roberts's translation is very loyal to the original text. Chen Xiaoli and Zhang Zhiquan (2011) use skopos theory as a guide to compare the translations of the chapter titles in these two translations. Their analysis shows that Brewitt-Taylor's translation is more liberal, using such strategies as omission, rewriting and sense-for-sense translation. Roberts's translation, on the other hand, is more literal, adopting a word-for-word strategy. They conclude that the two different styles of the TTs are brought about by different translation skopoi and translation briefs. The relevant research in Chinese will be discussed further in the next section.

In reference to articles and papers published on the English translations of the ST in Chinese, it is significant to note that not a single academic paper discussing the translations has been published in English. One of the reasons for this might be that very few Western researchers have a sound enough knowledge of the Chinese language to be able to read and understand the ST sufficiently. Any attempt at commenting on the TT without referring to the ST itself is not convincing, at least academically. This research therefore aims to fill this gap since it discusses both TTs and compares them to the ST.