A Comparative Study Of The Two Chinese Versions Of David Copperfield From The Perspective Of Manipulation Theory

Charles Dickens's novel, David Copperfield regarded as "the most perennially popular of his novels", enjoys a great reputation in the world. It has been translated into many languages and exerted a remarkable influence in the field of world literature. The translated texts by Dong Qiusi and Zhang Guruo are the significant ones to analyze among all Chinese versions.This thesis attempts to compare the two Chinese versions respectively by Dong Qiusi and Zhang Guruo from the perspective of Andre Lefevere's manipulation theory. It defines translation as a rewriting process where the ideology and poetics manipulate the output. The translator, Zhang Guruo is referred more likely as a "spiritual translator" while Dong Qiusi as a "faithful translator". Sharing great prestige in China, both works, with the highest faithfulness to the original, are classic translations of the masterpiece. Compared in a general vision, however, their translation strategies differ from each other in that Dong's translation excels in literality whereas Zhang's work peaks for its freestyle and excellent employment of the Chinese Language.In this thesis, the author adopts Lefevere's two major constraints (ideology and poetics) on translation to analyze the two Chinese versions of classical novel David Copperfield. Since the limited historical documents concerning patronage of the two versions, the constraint of patronage will not be the main concern of this thesis. The author endeavors to reveal the relationship of the two versions with ideology and poetics under which the translators did their work. Based on Andre Lefevere's manipulation theory, this thesis provides a detailed analysis about the ideology and poetics concerned, including individual ones of the two translators and social ones when they translate David Copperfield, so as to analyze their influence upon the translators" source text selection and translation activity. In doing so, the author wants to demonstrate why the two translators adopted different translation strategies. The different personal ideological and poetical systems decide the differences in their rewriting processes. Furthermore, the author also makes a detailed analysis on two versions from the perspectives of linguistics and culture.