Hsiung’s Cultural Translation of the Peking Opera Wang Baochuan

Abstract

In modern history, the first English version of the Peking Opera Wang Baochuan was translated by Chinese playwright S.I. Hsiung in 1934. When it was performed on stage in London in the 1930s, it won huge success. Later on, the English version Lady Precious Stream was adapted into different languages and performed on stage in more than 40 countries around the world. This paper explores Hsiung’s translation of the Peking Opera Wang Baochuan from a cultural perspective. The transcultural adaptation and rewriting of the Chinese story are examined with examples to analyze Hsiung’s translation strategies from the textual and extra-textual levels. The study reveals that if a translated text intends to be smoothly accepted in a target culture, the translator should reproduce the text on the level of culture as a whole rather than of the word or sentence of the source text, and take into account the poetics in the receiving culture when the translation is made.