Collusion And Culture Construction In Translation

In translation studies,an increasing attention has been paid to the influence of culture upon translation among translators home and abroad.Andre Lefevere and Susan Bassnett have both advocated guiding translation studies under a cultural background.In their cooperated book Constructing Cultures—Essays On Literary Translation,they attached great importance to cultural study on translation.Bassnett believed that collusion exerts influences between the author,the translator,as well as the target readers,thus providing us with a new perspective for translation studies.Enlightened by Susan Bassnett's notion of "collusion",the writer makes a contemplative study about the social address terms in Chinese classic novel Shui Hu Zhuan.The research studies the translation of social address terms in Outlaws of the Marsh and All Men Are Brothers from the perspective of collusion and culture construction.Through the study of the source text and target text,the thesis makes analysis as well as comparison of the two English versions,in order to investigate the possible criteria for the translators to evaluate their choices of words in translating the Chinese culture-specific terms.During the research,the writer discovers that collusion plays an important role in the process of translation,with a potential result of culture construction in the target readers' mind.Collusion is established between the author,the translator and the target readers over source text,source language,source-language culture,target text,target language,and target-language culture with the purpose of constructing culture by transmitting the source text together with its culture,and enriching target-language culture to achieve their co-existence and fusion.Furthermore,the thesis analyzes the factors influencing translators' manipulation,such as their historic backgrounds, ideologies,and social experiences.All of these elements constrain a translator's manipulation in interpreting the original intention of the author.Translation can be regarded as an activity that is composed of two rounds of communications,during which the translator bridges the source author and the target readers by acting as both the communicator and the audience.In the first round,a translator acts as the reader who is supposed to get the right intention of the source author;in the second round,he acts as the communicator who should manifest his interpretation of the source author's intention to the target readers through appropriate translations.Therefore,collusion is indispensable in the translation process.The writer has collected different social address terms from the Chinese novel of Shui Hu Zhuan,focusing on modest social address terms,neutral social address terms as well as honorific social address terms.The corresponding translations of these sentences are also gathered from its two English versions.After studying them carefully from the perspective of collusion and culture construction,the writer finds that collusion promotes a highly harmonious communication on cultural level between the source author,translator and the target readers,benefits the cultural transmission,and cultivates the co-existence of different cultures.The writer of the thesis hopes that the findings of the research can provide a reliable approach for the further study of the influence exerted by collusion among the source author, translator and target readers.