The Interaction Between Yan Fu's Translation Activities And The Ideology

Yan Fu is a prominent translator in Modern China. He mainly translated eight important Western works into China in his life, which has a great influence on Modern Chinese society. In more than 100 years, researches on Yan Fu's translations have been done to some degree, but most of them are conducted in traditional source-text oriented ways, so many of the findings need improving.With the translation studies taking the"Cultural Turn", the Manipulation School explores the socio-cultural background of translation and the influence of translations on the target culture and literary norms. Andre Lefevere, the representative of Manipulation School, claims that translation is under the manipulation of the target culture and at the same time he realizes the counterforce of translations on the existing ideology and poetics. This theory greatly challenges the traditional translation ways and gives a new light to reevaluate Yan Fu's translation phenomenon.This thesis analyzes Yan Fu's translations from this brand-new perspective of Manipulation Theory. Putting Yan Fu's translation activities into the socio-cultural context of Modern China, it analyzes the manipulation of the target culture, especially the ideology, on Yan Fu's translation activities and discusses the counterforce of his translations on Modern Chinese society. This analysis leads to the conclusion that there exists an interaction between Yan Fu's translation activities and that current ideology. On the one hand, the political and cultural ideology of Modern China and the particular background of the late 19th century constrained Yan Fu's translation activities, including his aim of translation, his selection of translation materials and his translation techniques. Concretely speaking, Yan Fu's aim of enlightening Chinese people and saving China from extinction by translating Western works was under the influence of that current ideology; his translations of Western works on philosophy, economics, law and so on conformed with the social ideology then; and his employment of such translation techniques as addition, deletion and adaptation all answered for the social ideology, too. On the other hand, Yan Fu's translated works also had a great influence on Modern Chinese society, especially on the ideology. The new concepts and views such as the evolution theory, the concept of freedom and democracy, the scientific views and so on introduced in Yan Fu's translations made Chinese people aware of the crisis ideology and patriotism, introduced a new world view and methodology to them and inspired them to struggle for freedom etc., which challenged the negative traditional values, remolded people's mind and greatly changed their ideology. Moreover, Yan Fu's case study illustrates that the criticism of a particular translation can not be isolated from the particular historical time. Thus, translation researches should not simply focus on the texts of translation but also focus on the contexts of translation. In this way our translation studies will be more fruitful.