20世纪初香港华文报纸上翻译小说中的女性——以《唯一趣报有所谓》(1905-1906) 所刊载的《七王会》为例

The lower social status of women in the early 20th century is palpable in China. The feudal ethical codes confined Chinese women at home, and the social inequality between the two sexes was prominent in Hong Kong at that time. When constructing the images of women in popular English detective stories into Chinese, the male translator(s) had to struggle between introducing the western prototype and abiding to the local feudal ethical codes. This article studies the women images in the Chinese translation of foreign literary works in Hong Kong newspapers in the early 20th century. Textual analysis reveals the manipulation and manhandling of women images in the Chinese renditions. The immanent cause behind such rewriting is exponentially expounded with reference to the population composition, sex ratios, literacy education, and occupational distribution.