A Descriptive And Comparative Study Of Three Chinese Versions Of Gone With The Wind From A Historical And Cultural Perspective

Based on the theories of the Manipulation School and Andre Lefevere and adopting a descriptive and comparative approach, the thesis aims at exploring the correlations between translators' decision-making in fiction translation and the socio-cultural contexts in which translations are produced.To better illustrate the author's point, a comparative study will be made between the first version of and two other versions of Gone With the Wind. The first is of 1940 done by Fu Donghua and the later ones of 1990 done by Dai Kan et al and Cheng Liangting et al. Such a study lays emphasis on revealing the diachronic differences and exploring what lies behind them. The author will compare the three translated texts on translators' choice of the novel for translation, on their language styles and their translation strategies, and specify the time-bound conditions related to literary translation by reconstructing the contexts where the three translations are produced. Instead of dealing with local, linguistic issues in the translations and thereby making judgment as to which version is better, the major concern of this study is to provide certain explanations to such questions as why this novel was chosen to be (re)translated, why it turned out to bear different styles in different times, and why it was first translated in this way and later in another.The evidence based on this study provides us with valid reasons to believe that the act of translating is usually constrained by certain socio-cultural forces (especially of the ideologies and prevailing poetics) in the overall environment and that translators tend to produce translations, echoing the requirements of the dominant ideology and the general poetic tendency as a whole.