Abstract：Abstract: Based on the Chinese-English Parallel Corpus of The Son of Heaven, this study analyzes Fulin’s speech and its English translation, trying to explore the specific manifestation and possible reasons of Fulin’s image flatting in the translating process. As the result shows, compared with the complicated “round character” in the original, Fulin’s image in the translation tends to be a simple and direct “flat character”, weakened in four aspects as the emperor, the son, the husband and the gifted scholar. The image flatting is mainly influenced by three factors: the publishing purpose, the reading expectation of target language readers and the cultural identity of the translator.
Key words: The Son of Heaven; parallel corpus; speech translation; image; flatting
