On Linguistic Diversity Of The Three Chinese Translations Of Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Perspective Of The Rewriting Theory

Since appearing in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin caused strong repercussions in America and produced profound effects toward abolitionism, the American Civil War and even on American history. Although after the Civil War, it was reviled as a book of political propaganda and disappeared from the scene of American literature, its literary value was reaffirmed in the middle periods of the 20th century and has taken a position in the world classics of literature from then on. Being introduced into China in 1901, Uncle Tom's Cabin also exerted great influence upon China at that time. During the 20th century, it was translated and retranslated again and again and thus many Chinese versions of it have appeared.The present study is based on the context of"cultural turn"in the field of translation studies and the framework of Lefevere's rewriting theory. Taking three representative Chinese translations of Uncle Tom's Cabin as the research objects, i.e. Hei Nu Yu Tian Lu in 1901 by Lin Shu and Wei Yi, Tang Mu Da Bo De Xiao Wu in 1982 by Huang Jizhong and Tang Mu Shu Shu De Xiao Wu in 1998 by Wang Jiaxiang, the thesis tries to analyze the effects of socio-cultural factors on translated versions by means of text analysis as such with empirical method. First of all, four angles are selected from three levels of linguistic structure to compare, analyse and describe the linguistic diversity of the three translations in an objective way. Specifically, culturally-loaded words in lexical level, passive sentences in syntactic level and styles as well as conjunction in discourse level. Then, from two specific perspectives of the rewriting theory, i.e. ideology and poetics, the author explores how the two factors produce effects in each level and how much the impacts are. The comparative study may not only deepen our understanding of Uncle Tom's Cabin and its three Chinese translations, but also facilitate us to find out the mechanism of socio-cultural constraints on translations.According to the study of the influence of ideologies and poetics on the linguistic diversity of the three Chinese translations of Uncle Tom's Cabin, it is discovered that the impacts of ideologies and poetics upon linguistic aspects of translations do not always follow the same tendency, but differ in different linguistic levels. To be specific, some conclusions have been drawn as follows: First of all, the effects of ideologies and poetics upon culturally-loaded words are strong. To begin with, under the influence of different social constraints, translators in different periods adopt different strategies to deal with word translation. Secondly, the versions in the same social period appear the same translation orientation. Lastly, translators in the same historical phase may adopt different translation tactics although they are inclined to follow the same translation tendency. This results from the influence of some other constraints upon the text, such as, personal ideology, the subtle disparities between ideologies and poetics caused by different historical times in which the works were translated. Next, ideologies and poetics produce less impacts on passive sentences, styles and conjunctive ties of translations. At first, translations in different times do show many disparities in the above aspects of either syntactic or discourse level due to different socio-cultural constraints. Then, the factors like personal constraints exert less influence in the two levels than that in the lexical level. Thirdly, the differences reflected in the two levels are caused not only by the impacts of socio-cultural factors but also by the changes and development of the Chinese language itself. This can also explain why similarities of the two versions in the same historical period outweigh disparities, because as a rather mature language, it is taken for granted that the modern Chinese doesn't have much change in short twenty years.