Translating Personal Reference

Drawing upon a parallel corpus of the Chinese martial arts novel Legends of the Condor Heroes (射雕英雄傳), this chapter aims to present a linguistic exploration of the English translation of personal reference used in the novel. In particular, the examination focuses on the protagonist Guo Jing (郭靖), investigating how the character makes reference to himself and to his listeners in conversations, through which his personal trait of humbleness is portrayed. Reviews from English readers of the translation show that Guo’s humbleness has been successfully rendered in the translated text, despite the linguistic disparity between the two languages that poses a challenge in translating personal reference, which is a significant contributor to the portrayal of humbleness. By examining and comparing the lexicogrammatical realization of personal reference in the source and the target texts, we try to explore how an equally humble character is developed in the translation. Findings indicate that the translator’s choices in translating personal reference are closely related to the translator’s analysis of the social status of the characters, and the translator also uses compensation strategies at both the microlevel of sentence and the macrolevel of text to render an equivalent humble image in the target text. The study is expected to shed light on how a pragmatically equivalent character could be developed in translation when the two languages are culturally distant.