A Contrastive Study On The Translation Strategies Of The Two Chinese Versions Of Jennie Gerhardt: From The Position Of Translated Literature In Literary Polysystem

With the emergence of the school of translation studies and the culture school in the l970s, people have already dropped the idea of evaluating translation text with norms of equivalence, error, good or bad and right or wrong. They begin to regard difference, fallacy, ambiguity and heterogeneous chaos as precious resources of literal selection which are directly influenced by cultural ideologies. The translation strategy that one translation work employs is closely related with the social, historical and cultural backgrounds in that specific period. If neglecting the historical and cultural backgrounds, putting translation in vacuum and simply evaluating it from syntax and grammar, we may misunderstand the translator's intention, make false evaluation on the translation and even overlook its contribution to the translation of a certain historical period.According to Israeli Even-Zohar's polysystem theory, there is a close relation between the translator's selection of translation strategy and the translated literature's position in the literary polysystem in a given period. When the translated literature assumes the central position, the translation activity will act as the innovative force, and introduce new thoughts and new literary modes. Under this circumstance, the translator will usually break the literature norms of his/her own country so as to make the translation keep"adequate"with the source text. And when the translated literature occupies the peripheral position, the translator will find an optimal existing secondary mode for the foreign text and give weight to the"acceptance"of the translated text.This thesis attempts to treat the polysystem theory as framework and conducts a historical and systematic description of translated literature. By probing into the relationship between the positions of Chinese translated literature and strategies adopted in literary works in the 1930s and the early 21st century respectively, the thesis finds out that in the former period the translated literature assumed the central position within Chinese literary polysystem and the translators thus tended to adopt the strategy of Europeanization, whereas the later period witnessed a peripheral position of translated literature, and the translators preferred to employ the strategy of Domestication.This thesis then makes a comprehensive contrast between Fu Donghua's (1935) and Fan Wenmei's translated versions (2001) of Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt in terms of vocabulary, syntax and text. It analyzes the strategy of Europeanization employed by Fu Donghua under the influence of the translated literature's central position and the domestication strategy used by Fan Wenmei influenced by the peripheral position, so as to explain the different influences of the positions of the translated literature on translation strategies as well as make a historical and objective evaluation of Fu Donghua's version.