Breeding Three Hounds of the Baskervilles in China: A Study of Three Early-Twentieth-Century Chinese Translations of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles
Author: Yi-Ting Zheng (Department of East Asian Studies, National Taiwan Normal University)
Vol.&No.：Vol. 61, No. 1
Date：March 2016
Pages：71-92
DOI：10.6210/JNTNULL.2016.61(1).04
Abstract：
Detective stories, a newly introduced literary genre for late Qing readers, became extremely popular in late Qing and early Republican China after Zhang Kunde 張坤德 translated and publishedfour Sherlock Holmes short stories in Shiwu bao (The Chinese Progress 《時務報》) in 1896. From 1896 to 1916, almost all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories were translated into Chinese, with most of them having multiple renditions. This paper describes three early-twentieth-century Chinese renditions of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. The three Chinese translations of The Hound of the Baskervilles are Xiangyao Ji (A Record of Subduing Demons 《降妖記》 1905), Guaiao An (A Case of a Strange Mastiff 《怪獒案》 1905) and Ao sui (A Haunting of a Mastiff 《獒祟》 1916).
In this paper, I analyze how the translators of the aforementioned three works manipulated the English text of The Hound of the Baskervilles by using narrative techniques of traditional Chinese fiction that late Qing and early Republican readers were familiar with to create a detective story discourse in the Chinese context. I also answer the following questions: What are the differences between Conan Doyle’s original work and the three renditions? In addition, how and why is the hound of the Baskervilles different in these three translations?
Keywords：The Hound of the Baskervilles, detective story, aesthetic culture, translation strategy
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