The Manipulation Theory And The Chinese Translation Of Children's Literature

With the cultural turn in translation studies of the 1970s, the focus of translation studies gradually changed from the language level to the cultural level and from the original author to the reader. According to Andre Lefevere's rewriting theory, translation is the most obviously recognizable type of rewriting which involves the factor of manipulation, and the manipulation may come from the poetics within the literary system or the ideology outside the literary system.For a long time in history, children's literature (hereafter CL) occupied only a marginal position in the literary polysystem, and few people cared about its translation, let alone the study on its translation. Compared with other types of literary translation, CL translation has its own characteristics. The target readers of CL are mainly children, while its translators are grown-ups. Due to the sharp differences between the adult translators and children readers in such aspects as psychology, faculty of understanding, life experience and angle of view, it is difficult for the translator to take into account the readers'real needs to reproduce the original with children's vision and language, so that the target readers are notably absent from the translation process of CL. In some cases, CL translation was not aimed at providing children readers with rich food for the mind but in order to achieve certain social and political purposes. Therefore, as a part of literary translation, the translation of CL is also subject to dual manipulations from within and outside the literary system.When we make a survey of the history of CL translation in China over the past century, we may conclude that CL in different historical periods was given different social missions in addition to playing a simple role of children's books; that influenced by the mainstream ideology, CL was often treated as a tool to serve certain social purposes. For example, the translation of CL in the late Qing Dynasty was mostly adult-oriented, and its purpose was not to delight children but to arouse the Chinese people's awareness of the need for self-improvement and national salvation. On the other hand, the translation of CL in the post-liberation period, due to the impact of the mainstream ideology at that time, focused on the CL of the Soviet Union with themes of war and peace, and propagating communist ideas, which was not really suitable for children readers.Using Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince and Other Tales as a case study, this thesis makes a rather detailed study of the background and language characteristics of Ba Jin's Chinese version with a view to revealing the manipulation in the translation. As the theme of love and beauty and complaint against the unfair society reflected in the original was in line with the dominant social ideology and the translator's own values and outlook on life, therefore The Happy Prince and Other Tales was able to be reborn in China in the 1940s. The literal translation approach which emphasizes faithfulness to the original and which was popular in the Chinese translation circle at that time led to the Europeanized long sentences in Ba Jin's version. At the same time, Ba Jin, influenced by his own poetics as a writer, used a large number of children's language forms and expressions in the translation, which not only faithfully conveyed the original meaning but also reproduced the original style.