A Study Of Lin Shu's Translation Of Joan Haste From The Perspective Of Rewriting

As is known to all, literary translation is a kind of cross-cultural communicative activity, which is constrained by factors such as ideology, poetics and patronage. At the same time, as the essence of translation is both dialogical and interdisciplinary translation study requires multi-disciplinary cooperation, learning from the findings of history, psychology, sociology, philosophy, poetics to enlarge its scope and to enrich its research profoundity.Lin Shu is a controversial translator in the late Qing dynasty. He has translated more than 180 different kinds of novels during his lifetime. Among his translations, there are a lot of foreign literary masterpieces which have been translated into classical Chinese with beauty and elegance. The translation strategy Lin Shu adopted can be called"free translation"which is regarded by some people as with the main feature of disloyal to the original texts. However, just because Lin Shu's good command of language skills profound attainment of literature, undoubtedly, the charm and name of the original works has been uplifted among the target readers through his rewriting. Further more, although Lin Shu was good at translating foreign novels into classical Chinese, yet he had not been constrained by outdated rules and limitations. Therefore, his translation, to some extend, made the old Chinese more expressive and applicable. By doing so, on the one hand, the flavor of classical Chinese culture has been well retained, and on the other hand, some newly emerging things of modern society have been aptly explained. Consequently, it is not exaggerated at all to say that his translation has also played an important part in the process of the transformation of Chinese literature.Ever since Andre Lefevere proposed his Rewriting theory, more and more attentions have been focused on relationships between target culture and literary translation. The Rewriting theory has made prominent three main control factors which can affect translators. These factors are ideology, poetics and patronage. In this thesis, the author analyzed Lin Shu's translation of Joan Haste, originally written by Ride Haggard to explore some traces of rewriting as Lin Shu's translation strategies. Through the comparative study of Lin's translation and Haggard's original work, the manipulation of foreign cultural images, portrait of characters and their psychological activity, description of environment and narrative perspective have been discussed respectively. Moreover, during the analysis of this paper, the author has illustrated Lin Shu's applications of manipulating strategies to Jia Yin Xiao Zhuan. These include mainly omission, addition, alteration and abridgement.What is more, in the light of the Rewriting theory, the author analysed the ideology, poetics and patronage of that age in which Li Shu lived and looked into the purpose and significance of Lin Shu's rewriting strategies. Though such a series researches of Lin Shu's translation Joan Haste, the purpose and aim of rewriting for his translation practices have been discovered. All these helped to reveal the hidden reasons behind Lin Shu's translation.