“Mirror, mirror, here I stand”: the representation of women in the Vietnamese translation of Irish chick lit

Abstract

The present study investigates the translation of the representation of women in Chick Lit written by Irish writers. The study makes use of a set of Irish contemporary women-centered fictional texts written by Marian Keyes, Cecelia Ahern and Cathy Kelly and their Vietnamese translations. The research argues that the representation of women in the translations is a synthesis of paratextual elements, cultural references, and cultural gender-behaviour norms associated with women. Applying the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies and using Toury’s (1995) coupled-pairs method, the research aims to investigate the translation of the representation of women in Chick Lit in Vietnamese translation and observe the translation strategies used in the translation process. The translated representation in this thesis was analysed from the Vietnamese concept of Four Virtues namely diligence, self-representation, speech, and courtesy. This approach has revealed subtle differences between the representation of women in English source texts and their Vietnamese translations, and these findings have contributed some new understandings to the issues of representation in translation. Firstly, it demonstrates that paratextual elements and cultural references play a significant role in understanding the identity of female characters in fictional texts. Secondly, the theme-based approach to the translation corpus enables this research to create a connection between translation studies and culture and gender studies. Thirdly, the descriptive approach to both the source texts and translations constitutes a useful tool for understanding the values of Chick Lit in our time. Lastly, this study is the first doctoral work that attempts to study literary translation involving the English and Vietnamese language pair in the context of translation of contemporary female popular fiction, therefore, it can be seen as a platform for future research in this field