Abstract:

Knowledge Translation Studies emphasizes that translation is a process of knowledge processing, reconstruction, and re-dissemination. The fantasy character, as “experiential knowledge” encoded by the author through specific grammatical structures, has its translation reconstruction validity directly affecting target language readers’ cognitive experience. From the perspective of Knowledge Translation Studies, this paper examines the five clauses expressing “nibbling mushrooms” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a case study, investigating transitivity shifts in Chinese translations and their impact on the knowledge reconstruction of fantasy characters. The findings reveal that the original text encodes an experiential knowledge trajectory of the fantasy character “from passive incompetence to active agency” through a progressive sequence of intransactive clauses. The translations by Zhao and Wu, to varying degrees, convert these intransactive clauses into transactive ones, disrupting the progressivity of this knowledge trajectory and resulting in the flattening of the character image. The study demonstrates that syntactic structure constitutes a crucial form of knowledge encoding, and alterations to syntactic structures in translation may lead to systematic distortion of source text knowledge.

Key words: Transknowletology, fantasy character, transitivity shifts, knowledge reconstruction, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland