An Ideological Approach To Literary Translation

Red Star over China is the book that established the fame of the American journalist Edgar Snow. It was the first epoch-making reportage that informed the world of the life style and beliefs of Chinese Red Army in the 1930s and helped the Communist Party of China win extensive support from people around the world. Its translation and popularity went through several different periods in China, which justifies the work as appropriate material for a case study of exploring the interrelations between literary translation and socio-historical background.Based on Lefevere's rewriting theory, this thesis aims at exploring the influence of ideology on literary translation supported with a case study of four different Chinese versions of Red Star over China published by Fu She in 1938, San Lian Publishing House in 1979, Hebei People's Publishing House in 1992 and Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in 2005 respectively. With a focus on ideological influence on translation, the thesis adopts the descriptive framework proposed by JoséLambert and Hendrik van Gorp and does a comprehensive and systematic comparison and analysis of the four versions.The four versions are compared and differentiated in terms of preliminary data that includes title of the book and the preface, macro-level that includes chapter titles, translation strategy and overall language style, micro-level that includes politics-bound diction and time-bound diction, and systemic context that includes the reception and inter-textual relations among the versions. Upon such comparison and analysis, it is proved in the thesis that the ideological manipulation penetrates almost every aspect of translation activities: from selecting the source text to be translated to the implementation of translation strategy to the diction at linguistic level and to the acceptance of the translation.