《西遊記》角色名稱英譯探討

Journey to the West: Identifying the Methods of Reaching the Destination

《西遊記》為明朝小說家吳承恩所著，內容提及諸多神、佛、精、怪、人，由 於名稱各具特色，且包含深厚東方文化元素，本研究因此加以整理分析其翻譯策略。 由於研究開始時，僅找到詹納爾（Jenner， W. J. F.）及余國藩所作之《西遊記》全文 翻譯，因此便以之為分析文本。分析結果顯示，《西遊記》角色名稱翻譯策略有六： 梵語音譯、中文音譯、中梵混合音譯、字譯、意譯及加注。《西遊記》英譯本之所以 融入梵語，原因可能在於佛教源自印度，因此，神祇之梵語名稱更能讓非中文讀者 理解。

This article aims to identify the translation methods for processing names of gods， demons， monsters， and humans in a renowned Chinese classic， Journey to the West. Written by Fen Menglong in the Ming dynasty， this novel incorporates an abundance of then religious beliefs， folklore， legends， cultures， and politics. Because of this characteristic， many names appearing in this masterpiece bear cultural elements， which may disappear through the method of literal translation. To understand how translators retained the elements of every name， a corpus was constructed for studying the names and their English translations. In this corpus， only Jenner’s and Yu’s translations were selected because their works were the only two complete versions that could be accessed before this study commenced. Through the analysis， six methods were identified: (1) adopting the Sanskrit transliteration; (2) adopting the Chinese transliteration; (3) combining the Sanskrit and Chinese transliteration; (4) word-based translation; (5) meaning-based translation， and (6) providing footnotes. In addition， three differences exist between the methods identified in this study and those proposed by former scholars: the impossible use of direct copy， three kinds of transliteration， and higher use frequency of footnotes. The other observation is the special use of Sanskrit transliteration in tackling the names of Buddhist gods. This phenomenon derives from the fact that Buddhism originated in India， and it is more likely that non-Chinese readers know the names of Buddhist gods by Sanskrit.