A Descriptive Study Of Cultural Translation Variation From The Perspective Of Manipulation Theory

Lin Shu was an important and controversial translator in the Late Qing Dynasty. Without any knowledge of foreign languages, he had translated more than 180 western novels in classical Chinese. It was Lin Shu who firstly introduced Shakespere and his works to China. His work YinBianYanYu exerted great impact on the Chinese literature. However, according to traditional translation theories, his translation has been criticized as"unfaithfulness". To everyone's surprise, Lin Shu's unfaithful translations were warmly received by the readers then and produced a tremendous social and cultural impact. Therefore, it is necessary to review this controversial figure and his translation with a more sophisticated approach.Lefevere, one of the representatives of the Manipulation School, argues that translation is a rewriting of the source text and is subject to ideological and poetological constraints. Accordingly, translators adjust the source text to bring the target text in line with the dominant ideology and poetics at the request of different audiences in different times. Translation is not only culture rewriting but also culture manipulation. The thesis intends to probe into cultural translation variation from the perspective of Manipulation Theory on the basis of a case study of YinBianYanYu by Lin Shu. After comprehensive analysis of the ideological and poetological manipulation, the author points out the phenomena of translation variation, including the adaptation of cultural image, Confucian ethics terms, appellation terms, idioms and useful western cultural information, the choice of classical Chinese, the imitation of Chinese classics, and adaptation of syntactic features were Lin Shu's wise choices of conforming to social culture environment, according with literature norm, and catering for the intended readers'given psychology need in a given time, thus to realize the expected function of the target text. Therefore, it can testify the rationality of cultural translation variation in Lin Shu's translation. Meanwhile, it argues that translation variation can not only be employed in application translation(translating non-literary texts) but also in literature translation, which enriched translation activity.