Translation In Ideological And Poetical Manipulation-A Case Study Of Folk Adages In A Dream Of Red Mansions

"Culture Turn" has become a tendency of translation research. The Belgium scholar Andre Lefevere is one of the representatives of cultural school. His Manipulation Theory has been a famous one in the cultural school of translation research. They advocate that translation is another way of cultural rewriting, a cultural manipulation, and also all translation is equal to the manipulation of the original text through some motivation. Andre Lefevere puts forward the three elements in the process of translation: ideology, poetics, and patronage. The Manipulation School holds that translation will inevitably be influenced by ideology and poetics all the time, among which, the patronages manipulate ideology, and the professionals manipulate poetics. This theory is of great importance to the research of translation so that we can examine our translation in the long hisorical and cultural background, and also it concentrates us from "SL-Oriented" to "TL-Oriented".Hong Lou Meng is one of the most classical novels in Chinese history, which abounds with a lot of Chinese characteristics including cultural history, people's customs and habits, psychological minds and so on. As is known, most folk adages are of figurative language and their images are usually vivid, culture-specific, humorous and instructive. Therefore they are the quintessence of a language. The folk adages in this thesis are from the classical Chinese novel A Dream of Red Mansions, and they are difficult enough to be translated, since English and Chinese belong to two entirely different language families and they are remote in their cultural aspects such as culture traditions, concepts of values, aesthetic standards, religious beliefs and so on. But under the manipulation of social ideology and poetics, Yang Hsian-yi and Gladys Yang make almost perfect efforts to the folk adages translation in which Chinese cultural characteristics are fully reflected.There are four chapters in this thesis. In the first chapter, the author mainly introduces the definition and content of Andre Lefevere's Manipulation Theory. In the second chapter, the author illustrates the origin of folk adages, and then analyzes the semantic features and rhetoric features of folk adages in A Dream of Red Mansions. Through these concrete analyses, we can have a clear recognization that these folk adages convey the rich cultural knowledge of traditional China in every aspect. In the third chapter, the author mainly analyzes how ideology and poetics manipulate Yang's folk adages translation in A Dream of Red Mansions from Lefevere's Manipulation Theory. Under the social background in Yang's time, in order to remain the cultural loaded words and original flavors of folk adages in A Dream of Red Mansions, the Yangs made almost appropriate measures to deal with. In the fourth chapter, the Yangs' translation strategy in A Dream of Red Mansions is introduced under Manipulation Theory, and a summary is made about the Yangs' translation methods. With this theoretical framework, this thesis shows that folk adages translation was strictly restricted by Chinese cultural characteristics in A Dream of Red mansions. However, we can benefit much from the Yangs' translation, because they have succeded in adopting almost perfect translating strategy towards the cultural turns.