On Herbert Allen Giles' Translation Of Liao Zhai Zhi Yi

The classic work Liao Zhai Zhi Yi (《聊斋志异》) has long been held to be one of the greatest short story collections of the world and its author Pu Songling naturally regarded as one of the greatest short story writers. Many scholars throughout the world have been doing researches about him and his works. Besides, there have been different versions of different languages on this work. This dissertation is aimed at making a tentative research about Herbert Allen Giles' translation of Liao Zhai Zhi Yi by using the cultural approach to allusion translation.Translation has always been regarded as one of the most primitive and complex activities of human beings. Still, literary translation is held to be the most complex of all translation activities. With the Cultural Turn in the 1980s, more and more attention has been paid to cultural exploration instead of the transforming process of two sets of linguistic signs. Translation now is widely accepted as an activity of cultural exchange and language as the carrier of culture dissemination.Allusions are expressions with strong cultural connotations and distinct images and thus we can safely say they carry much more amount of cultural information compared with ordinary words or sentences. In the previous time, different researches on allusion translation have been conducted. Most of them concentrate on translation methods from various angles, such as pragmatics, semiotics, etc. Of course, there are also scholars who have made some researches on allusion translation about a certain specific text, such as the allusion translation about Hong Lou Meng (《红楼梦》) and Mu Dan Ting (《牡丹亭》). All of these works are worthwhile and significant, but this thesis differentiates from all of them in that it is aimed at making a tentative research about Herbert Allen Giles' translation of Liao Zhai Zhi Yi by using the cultural approach to allusion translation.The allusions in Liao Zhai Zhi Yi fall into four main categories: allusions of literary works, of ancient myths and historical events, of folk legends and customs and of religions and superstition. As for the translation of allusions, there are mainly six approaches: literal translation, literal translation plus paraphrase, literal translation plus footnotes, liberal translation plus footnotes, liberal translation by substituting images, liberal translation by omitting images. Herbert Allen Giles uses all of them except the second one.The main theory adopted in this dissertation is the cultural approach of translation, which reminds us that any text is never in a vacuum but entangled in a linguistic as well as cultural background. The cultural approach of translation, as the mainstream guideline for translation activities nowadays, highlights the dependence on both the SL and TL culture when understanding and representing the original text. It enlarges our scope and encourages us to position a single piece of writing in the framework of its culture. The theory of cultural approach of translation has inherent connections with allusion translation because the understanding and representing of allusions is based on certain cultural presuppositions, shared by the sender and receptor.The methodologies applied here are analytic approach and deduction.Of course, there are some unavoidable weaknesses or mistakes in this dissertation due to the limitation of the author and the length of this paper. The problems may include: firstly, the source language itself is written in classical Chinese language, which poses a difficult task. Secondly, the indirectness of allusion always involves rich historical and cultural knowledge, which requires a wide horizon for understanding and representing them.Anyhow, the author of this dissertation has done her due share to contribute to allusion translation. After a careful study, we find that the cultural approach of translation is a useful trial in guiding allusion translation and that Giles' approaches to allusion translation is mainly target-language-readers-oriented.