On Character Narratives in the Translation of Chinese Gong An NovelsWith Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An) as an Example

When translating Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee , the Dutch translator Robert Hans van Gulik (Gao Luopei) noticed the insufficiency of the functional construction of the characters in traditional Chinese case-solving novels, and carried out a psychological re-narrative operation on the characters in the original text. He focused on the characters themselves and their inner demands, highlighting the goodness, truthfulness, and wickedness of the human nature in turn by means of an apparent, naturalized, and rationalized narrative. His aim was to enable the readers of the translated text to get close to the characters, which enhances the artistic appeal and the charm of the characters in the translated version of Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee . The character repositioning of the translated narrative of Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee is the translator’s careful adaptation based on the differences between the Chinese and Western views of human nature, which, on the one hand, reflects the translator’s manifestation of the universal human nature narrative, and, on the other hand, reveals the translator’s Western culture-oriented narrative stance.