Text Analysis Exercise In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

Assignment Title: Text Analysis Exercise

Introduction

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was best known for her writings regarding the unequal status of women within the constraint of marriage. Gilman, as a sociologist and a reformer, argued that women’s traditional role in domestic sphere confined their creativity and intelligence. The text to be analyzed here is a remarkable work of Gilman’s: the short story The Yellow Wallpaper. The story is set in 1892 and is told in strict first-person narration in the form of a journal by a woman who suffers from depression. Her physician husband, John, suggests that she should stay in a mansion in the suburbs for “rest cure” treatment. The forced passivity leads to her realization of her powerlessness thus gradually

Instead of an omniscient narrator, the first person point of view provides the readers a limited perspective on how the incident unfolds. It focuses exclusively on her own thoughts, perceptions and feelings; and the detail-oriented depiction towards her observation has become a stream-of-consciousness mumbling to the journal.

In this essay, I will first identify the non-equivalence at a word level among the source text and the target text. Then I will attempt using the device of lexical cohesion identified by Halliday and Hasan to examine the output of translation. Finally, I will analyze the difficulties in translating the technique of “stream-of-consciousness” writing at linguistic level and semantic level.

Equivalence at Word Level

In The Yellow Wallpaper, there is a constant use of “creep”. Since the narrator first noticed the woman in wallpaper, she used “creepy” to describe the odd-looking shape, foreshadowing the desperation. Here are some example sentences:

• And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.
這看起來像一個女人在那圖案後方鬼鬼祟祟的
-> it looks like a woman sneaking behind the pattern.
• I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly […]