The impact of foreignising translation strategies on the reception of contemporary Chinese short fiction: empirical evidence from psychometric instruments and eye tracking

<p dir="ltr">As more and more contemporary Chinese novels are being translated and disseminated to the English-speaking world, their reception has drawn extensive scholarly attention in China. It is argued that the outcome of reception is intimately correlated with translation production, among other non-translation-related factors. Building on theoretical and philosophical arguments in literary criticism, aesthetics or reader response theory, most existing studies have delved into reader reception at the social level largely based on measures such as textual analysis targeting implied readers, book reviews written by professional readers, comments taken from online platforms and reading communities, as well as questionnaires and interviews. Only a limited number of studies have investigated the individual reader reception through evidence-based approaches using data collected through multiple sources, such as relevant empirical research instruments and psychometric measures. Focusing on reception at the individual level, the current thesis seeks to explore the possible link between the selections of domesticating and foreignising translation strategies and their possible effects on the actual reader reception outside China.</p><p dir="ltr">The present thesis aims to deal with this issue by answering the following three research questions: (1) Do predominantly domesticating or foreignising translation strategies impact readers’ immersion and engagement? (2) Do predominantly domesticating or foreignising translation strategies affect reading behaviour? Specifically, how do domesticating and foreignising translation strategies affect reading fluency characterised by mean fixation duration, fixation counts, progressive saccade length and the number of regressions? (3) Is there an interaction between the psychometric measures and reading fluency, such that higher immersion will predict greater reading fluency and greater reading fluency in turn predicts higher immersion? The current thesis therefore attempts to measure the reception of two manipulated texts adapted from a full-length contemporary Chinese short novel by Australian readers using a combination of eye tracking and psychometric measures.</p><p dir="ltr">Contrary to expectations, this case study research found no significant differences in the self-reported measures and the global eye movement patterns of readers across the full texts. However, the results that foreignised items received significantly more total fixation counts and higher regression-in counts were detected when only the manipulated cultural items were compared either combined or in different categories of cultural markers. This may indicate that although the impact of these strategies are visible in some eye movement patterns, this translation effect tends to be diluted over a text as a whole as readers immerse themselves in the story to the extent that the effect cannot be discerned in post-hoc comprehension and psychometric measures. In other words, while these predominantly domesticating or foreignising translation strategies may have an effect on eye movement patterns when readers encounter the individual items, translation does not impact their ability to successfully create situation models or their sense of immersion into the story world. This is an important finding in terms of our understanding of these widely discussed and accepted theoretical constructs. It is hoped that this study will therefore add new perspectives to the growing body of the empirical evidence on the reception of translated literature.</p>