The Translator 's Identity, Choice And "Punishment" In Late Qing Dynasty And Early Republic Of China

There are a lot of special and typical phenomenons in translation activities in each era. We take the period of late Qing and early Republic as the background of the paper; the Eco-Translatology theory as the framework; and ZHOU Shoujuan as example, in order to see the general characteristics of the literary translation at that time by analyzing the interesting phenomenon observed in his translation activity. We try to find the internal and the external causes of the phenomenon, and to examine again the value of the literary translation in late Qing and early Republic. This paper is divided in three parts which concerns respectively the person, the activity and the result of translation:The key point of the first part lies in the translator himself. It starts with the multi-identities of ZHOU in his professional life in analyzing what made him a multitasker, and what are the influences between his translator, writer and editor identities. ZHOU’s multi-identities is embodied not only in his professional life, but in the translation activity: he is the first reader of the original text and the producer of the translation. We propose a new concept the traducto-creation in according to the examples of the mixture of translation and creation. As a result, we find that the traducto-creation is the reflect of the multi-identities in literary translation. The second part pays attention to the translation activity. By means of examining ZHOU’s choice of the length and the theme of the original text, as well as his choice and the change in the style of the target language (traditional Chinese-mixture Chinese-vernacular Chinese), and his translation strategy (free translation/traducto-creation--literal translation), we concentrate on looking for the important facteurs, personal and environmental, who have influenced his choice and his change as well. His change was just like the epitome of the literary translation transition at the beginning of the20th century. We talk in the third part about the post- event of ZHOU’s translation, emphasizing on the reception of his translation at that time and nowadays before analyzing the farceurs by which the reception can probably be influenced (reader-publisher-market, etc). The statement about the aging of the translation is however denied in spite of the fact that almost nobody still reads ZHOU nowadays, while the historical value of his translation is affirmed. We suggest it necessary to reread the old versions.