Politics, Ideology And The Selection Of Literary Texts For Translation In China From 1900 To 1949

This thesis discusses the interactions between politics, ideology and literary translation in China in the first half of the last century. The reason for the choice of this period is because the great changes of politics and ideology during this period can manifest the interactions between the three factors better than the peace time. Its main theory support comes from the cultural construction theory of Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere.The traditional study of translation has mainly been approached from the perspective of comparative literature, which has turned out to be too narrow. After the 1970s, translation studies made a real breakthrough and tended to move in the direction of the collaborative approach. Encouraged by this, the Chinese translation studies also made great improvements. However, the study of the politics of language and translation has been a blind spot of the Chinese scholars. Thus, this research hopes to find the correlations between politics, ideology and literary translation by putting the text in the context of literature, history, politics and ideology.The whole dissertation includes four parts.The introduction introduces the basic objective, the scope of research and the methodologies of this research.The first chapter is a review of the previous literature on cultural translation studies, which includes the cultural turn and contemporary translation studies. Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere's theory about the cultural construction forms the theoretical basis of the dissertation. Besides, the first chapter also discusses the recent translation studies in China and points out the achievements and deficienciesThe second chapter is the main body of the whole thesis. Starting from the influence of politics and ideology on the selection of literary works for translation, I describe in detail the interactions between the three factors in China in the first half of the last century. The selection of works for translation is the first step of translation, which will be influenced by many factors. But politics and ideology are always the determinant factors. Thus, the process of selection can show the manipulation of politics and'ideology more clearly, as well as the real purpose of the translator.In this part, the first fifty years of the last century is divided into three periods by different historical events, which are 1900-1914, 1915-1936, and 1937-1949. Thepolitics, ideology and the selection of literary translations all have different characteristics in these three periods, which proves the interactions between them.The third chapter is the conclusion of the whole thesis.From the above analysis, I come to the conclusion that during the first half of the last century in China, literary translation also influenced the dominant politics and ideology while it was manipulated by them.