重讀鍾理和〈假黎婆〉：一個關於翻譯與譯註的研究

Rereading Chung Li-ho’s “My Gali Grandma”:A Study on Translation and Annotation

任何翻譯，都是重新解讀某個文本的契機。譯者透過自己的精讀（close reading）把來源語（source language）轉換成目標語（target language），凡是牽涉到歷史、文化的部分，為了避免語言轉換過程中的意義流失，都可能加上譯註，這也就是為什麼翻譯研究界長期以來非常注重文化負載詞（culturally loaded terms）的翻譯問題。鍾理和的短篇小說〈假黎婆〉自1960年發表於《聯合報》副刊以來，學界對其關注不多，但2014、2015年相繼出現由馬訶蘭（T. M. McClellan）與羅德仁（Terrence Russell）翻譯的譯本（題名分別為 “My Grandma from the Mountains” 以及 “The Gali Wife” ）以後，透過兩位譯者對於故事中許多文化負載詞（像是「假黎」、「孤拔」、「番界」與「馘首」［或「出草」］等）的詮釋，兩相對照之下，就出現了許多可以討論的問題。例如，「假黎」這種身分該怎樣翻譯？「孤拔」到底是原住民使用的什麼物件？歷史上曾存在的「番界」該如何定義？還有「馘首」這種傳統原住民習俗該怎樣在譯註中進行說明？本論文從上述詞彙的翻譯出發，針對兩位譯者的譯註進行比對分析，藉此討論譯註的跨文化理解功能，並彰顯出譯者的任務並非只是進行語言轉換，而是必須深入研究，累積正確的相關知識，才能夠把原文背後的歷史、文化脈絡透過譯文與譯註表現出來。常言道，「譯者亦學者」，而〈假黎婆〉這一類文本的翻譯可說是最佳例證。

 

Any translation can be a new opportunity to revisit a given text. Via close reading, translators transfer texts in their source languages to target languages; and, to avoid the loss of historical and cultural meanings of the texts, adding annotations to the translated texts can be a useful strategy for them. “My Gali Grandma,” Chung Li-ho’s short story, was translated into English in 2014 and 2015, by T. M. McClellan and Terrence Russell, respectively. After we compare how the culturally loaded terms, such as “Gali,” “Guba,” “savage frontier,” and “headhunting,” in the story have been translated and interpreted in the annotations, enquiries can be made about many issues. How can “Gali,” a term related to a certain Indigenous ethnicity, be properly translated? What exactly is “Guba”? How can we define correctly “savage frontier,” a historically existent border between the areas resided by the Han Chinese and Indigenous peoples in Taiwan? How should we put “headhunting,” a traditional practice of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples, into context in translation annotations? In order to discuss the cross-cultural understanding function of translation annotations, this paper will analyze comparatively how the terms mentioned above have been translated by the two translators.