Polyphony In Zhao Susu’s Chinese Translation Of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Since the cultural turn of translation studies in the1990s, more and morescholars have switched their research perspectives from the canonical form of purelanguage into the influences on translation exerted by such exterior elements aseconomy, society and culture, attempting to find out the rules of the translationactivity in a broad field. Though translation study has achieved great achievements,it has neglected the influences of other factors because of its focusing on researcheson the influences of some exterior elements.Society is a complex polyphonic world, full of multi-plurality andcontradiction. World multipolarization provides room for the development ofindependent and related thoughts, art and language. Through the case study ofliterary translation，this thesis, with an attempt at shifting the previous translationstudies from the outward perspective to the “multi-voiced” study from theperspectives of polyphonic poetics and ideology, explores the relationships betweenpolyphonic poetics and ideology, and the relations within the two categoriesrespectively in the translation process.The author chooses Zhao Susu’s Chinese translation of Lady Chatterley’sLover as the example and Rao Shuyi’s Chinese version as the reference to illustratethe polyphony of Zhao’s, from both aspects of poetics and ideology. The author findsthat polyphonic poetics can be mainly classified into two levels, one at the textualand the other the subjective. Polyphonic poetics, at the textual level, is thecombination of independent but related motif, plot and style which reflect thecharacteristics of the original and serve the intention of the novel’s author’s creation.And polyphonic poetics at the subjective level, based on the subjects involved in thetranslation, can be grouped into the poetics of the author, the target reader and thetranslator, and three poetics above can be seen throughout the poetics at the textuallevel. In the translation process, as the organizer and the executor, the translatortakes both the poetics of the author and that of the target into consideration. What’smore, the translator should pay equal attention to the dominant poetics of the targetculture and that of their own. Compared with the poetics of the original, the authorfinds that the poetics of Zhao’s translation is not the duplication of the original butthe product of the multi-leveled equal dialogues, which results from the influence ofpolyphonic ideology. Ideology in the original text, ideology of the target culture and ideology of the translator enjoy equal right and are independent to each other. In thetranslation process, the translator neither completely abandons the ideology of theoriginal because of the ideology of the target culture, nor fully duplicates that of theoriginal to meet the demands of the target reader. What the translator does is tosearch the balance between polyphonic ideology and polyphonic poetics, by makingthe dialogues and compromises among different ideologies with equality.In conclusion, it is revealed that translation is the process of consideringpolyphonic poetics and ideologies. For polyphonic poetics both at the textual leveland the subjective level, each poetics among them is independent and interacts witheach other. And polyphonic poetics is subordinate to and determined by polyphonicideology.