Recapitulation, Findings, and Critical Observations

This research has explored the translations of natural historical narratives as

interpretations. The target texts translated by Jackson Tan (陳政三) are ‘authorial’ publications, where narration-filled stories are spiced up with self-translated quotations. By contrast,

Nan-Chung Young (楊南郡)’s heavily annotated translation is a ‘translatorly’ publication.

During their belated translation careers, both translators escalated their translatorly ‘authorship’

over the original text, due largely to their unique reportage styles and contributing factors, among which the institutional factor (i.e. Institutional Support) was the most important empowering agent.

The two translators acted as translator-reporters, as they tended to discover and investigate stories through interpretation of the narratives. Their attempt to do so matches the typical agenda of writers of literary journalism.

Regarding their published works, both Tan and Young have described either their translation(s) or the original text(s) as a piece of literary journalism. While Tan worked at journalism-related organizations, Young taught literary journalism at a university. A close look at discourses on literary journalism and its development in Taiwan revealed that the definitions, characteristics and themes of the genre matched those of the target texts explored for this research. Writers of literary journalism in Taiwan tackle six main themes, three of which are closely related to the texts for this research: Ecological observation; Indigenous peoples; and Historical sites, old mountain trails, local customs and history. Tan and Young adopted three of

the four interdisciplinary approaches for literary journalism: journalistic skills (Journalism);

historical research method (History); and photographs (Photography)⁵⁷. Young conducted additional fieldwork (Anthropology) for the texts he translated later in his life.

Given Tan’s and Young’s unique reportage styles, what has become of my hypothesis is:

A translator who has already placed many notes would not add (much) more information to the translated text, since these notes suffice to explain what the reader needs to know.

Further exploration of the hypothesis raised two research questions:

1) Whether much paratextual insertion means less paraphrased/unwarranted translations?

2) Why and how did both translators still add so much information to the translation?

Methodologically, the questions have been explored through ST-TT comparisons. Results show that both Tan and Young strategically used explicitation. The explicitated information is either supplementary to the story being covered, or acts as a vehicle for conveying their desired messages in a covert manner.

As a strategy to highlight what may be implicit, explicitation is divided into specification and addition. Through specification, both translators included specialized knowledge (historical, anthropological, philosophical, biological, mountaineering, etc.). As to addition, Tan tended to regale the reader with extra pieces of amusing information; Young, for his part, would impart a philosophical quality to the TL units.

Literariness, an indispensable element of literary journalism, functions to provoke an emotional response in readers. The added elements (humor in Tan’s case, philosophical musings on the author’s thoughts in Young’s case, etc.) serve the recipient of the TT, engaging and

57 Both Tan and Young attached many self-taken pictures or photographs offered by other specialists as a part of the paratext.

immersing him/her in scenes re-contextualized based on the translator-reporter’s interpretations.

In this sense, explicitation (in particular addition) functions in the same way as literariness.

As shown by the examples of explicitations, both Tan and Young have retooled the structure of the SL units. Each TL unit is made more heterogeneous, becoming a reworked mixture that carries descriptive, supplementary and explanatory information. The final product is thus more able to convey the author’s thoughts or the translator-reporter’s desired messages.

As far as paratextuality is concerned, it displays the dynamics that lie within the ST-TT relations. Readers of both Tan’s and Young’s publications are always greeted with the sight of paratextual devices intended for supplementary, explanatory and corrective purposes. Bilingual examination of the examples of non-paratextual elements (i.e. self-translated quotations in Tan’s case and translations in Young’s case) indicated that the explicitations highlighted in Sections 4.2-4.5 serve two of the said three functions (supplementary and explanatory). The aforesaid reworked structure of each example was dissected using natural historical knowledge. Results have shown that text and paratext together shape a whole body of interpretations that serve the translator-reporter’s agenda, an observation in favor of my revised thesis statement below.

All in all, this research explored Tan’s narration-filled authorial works, where he fleshed out stories with self-translated quotations, and Young’s heavily annotated translation, to which the paratexts appended by Young were so informative that they were translated to Japanese, the language in which the original text was written, including the captioned pictures offered in Young’s publication. Both translator-reporters incorporated the elements of literary journalism into the re-contextualized target texts, and considered either their annotated translation(s) or the source text(s) as a piece of literary journalism. In both cases, the source text points not to itself but to the translated text; the source text offers a threshold to the translator (more precisely

“translator-reporter” in this research), as well as the translator’s career and reputation. Based on these observations and the analysis of meaning-laden explicitations, I claim that the source text as a whole functions as a paratext to, and is at the service of, the target text, overturning

Genette’s notion of translation as a paratext to the original text.

Exploration into the research questions, on the other hand, has led to two critical observations concerning both translator-reporters. This is the response to my third research question: 3) What problems might occur as to the translators’ interpretations?

In the case of Tan, his explicitation (in particular the addition of amusing information) would undermine the anthropological precision of the source text; so would the debatable

abbreviation of some source language units. As for Young, despite his statement of being faithful to the source text as the highest translation principle, the philosophical ideas superimposed over the target text, albeit very well-grounded, would be a diversion from what is normally known as faithful translation.

More importantly, these critical observations and the explicitations discussed in the examples (Chapter 4) reflect the various interpretations contained in the translations of natural historical narratives in the Formosan context, throwing into relief the hidden agenda and the significance behind the interpretation.