Feminist translation of sexual content : A quantitative study on Chinese versions of The Color Purple

We present a quantitative analysis on a feminist translation of The Color Purple by Alice Walker. The analysis identifies distinctive translation strategies in the Chinese version of the novel by Jie Tao, a prominent feminist translator, through comparison with the version by Renjing Yang, who did not identify as feminist. We annotated 197 sentences in the novel in terms of their sexual content type and the translation strategy adopted by Tao and Yang. Results show that the feminist version constitutes a slightly more faithful translation, with more frequent use of explicit translation strategies and less frequent use of conservative ones. Further, it exhibits distinctive choices in translation strategy for different sexual content types. The feminist perspective likely motivated the relatively explicit treatment of references to private parts, body explorations and female bodily phenomena, and relatively conservative treatment of rape, illicit relations, and stigma related to virginity.