War Trauma in Liaozhai Zhiyi: A Study of Intralingual Diachronic Translation Techniques

This paper discusses the issues of rendering the horror aspect of war trauma in intralingual diachronic translations of Liaozhai Zhiyi (Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio). The overall issue examined is how to effectively render the intense, intricate mood of war trauma and maintain access for modern readers. Though there have been studies on literary translation assessing different facets of cultural transmission, research on the particular challenges of depicting war trauma in intralingual diachronic translations, particularly in the light of historical and cultural distance between the source text (ST) and contemporary readers, remains scarce. It is with this intention that the current study seeks to fill this void by considering Zhonghua Book Company (ZBC), one of China's most prestigious antiquarian publishers. It pays attention to how these methods succeed in retaining the emotional and horror aspects of the ST, which are critical to the depiction of war trauma. Based on Yu’s (2002) theory of war trauma and Chen’s (1999) techniques of translation, the paper applies a comparative and descriptive methodology in examining certain cases of translation. The results illustrate the important contribution of intralingual diachronic translations towards cultural preservation alongside their capacity for enabling a dynamic interaction between historical and modern visions. The research highlights the relevance of translation as a tool not just of cultural preservation but also of overcoming temporal boundaries, providing useful insights to both the literary study of horror and the theory of translation.