Ideological And Poetological Manipulation In Literary Translation

An extraordinary boom in translation research has been witnessed since the proposal of the "cultural turn" in the1980s. The "cultural turn" in translation studies means the study of translation at the interface with culture, taking translation studies away from merely linguistic analysis, and bringing it into contact with other disciplines.Andre Lefevere, one of the representatives of cultural school, put forward the manipulation theory. According to him, translation is subject to certain constraints and these "control factors" manipulate the production and reception of translated texts. In addition, Lefevere proposes that translation is actually a rewriting of the original, and the manipulation of these "control factors" is reflected in each translator’s rewriting degree of the original. He classifies these "control factors" into three aspects:ideology, poetics and patronage.Taking Lefevere’s manipulation theory as theoretical framework, the author of the dissertation makes a comparative analysis, from the perspective of ideology and poetics, of the two Chinese versions of The Catcher in the Rye which were produced by Shi Xianrong in the1960s and Sun Zhongxu after2000respectively.Detailed studies lead to three findings. Firstly, translation is not purely a transformational activity between languages, but also a meeting and confrontation between cultures. Next, it is further proved that ideology and poetics do manipulate translators in their translating processes. At last, it is not acceptable and comprehensive to evaluate a translated text just by deciding if it is linguistically faithful to the original or not. Apart from faithfulness or equivalence, one has to put the cultural and historical factors into consideration and analyze how these factors affect the translator’s translating process.Findings of the study may provide some practical implications. On the one hand, the findings of the study, to some extent, contribute a little to the criteria of judging the quality of a translated text; On the other hand, this study also sheds some light on the future studies on translation phenomena from the perspective of other disciplines.