A Comparative Study Of Two English Versions Of Ah Q Zheng Zhuan From The Perspective Of Andre Lefevere’s Rewriting Theory

The1970s witnessed the emerging of a new translation study school, the Translation Studies School, which is featured by its advocating of placing the translation study under a broader culture circumstance, instead of on the traditional word, phrase, sentence and at most the text level. Another feature of this new translation school is that compared with the normative, prescriptive method adopted in traditional translation study, it employs comparative, descriptive method to make empirical studies on translation.Andre Lefevere is one of the most notable representatives of the Translation Studies School. His most celebrated translation theory is the Rewriting Theory. He argues that translating is a rewriting of the original, and no matter what the intention of the rewriting (translating) is, it reflects certain ideology and certain poetics, and is accomplished under certain patronage, and manipulates literature to function in a given society in a given way. What Andre Lefevere concerns is the influence on translators by the three factors in his Rewriting Theory, to be specific, ideology, poetics and patronage. Quite different from the traditional translation study theories which focus on whether this translated version is superior to that one or not, whether a particular expression has been translated "correctly" or not, Lefevere;s Rewriting Theory offers the translation study a new perspective to discover why such an original source text would be selected, but not others; and why the translator would adopt such a translating strategy, and present such a version.Ah Q Zheng Zhuan, the first piece of literature that is written in vernacular Chinese after the May Fourth Movement, is the only medium-length novel by Lu Xun, father of modern Chinese literature. It is also one of the most popular stories that Lu Xun has ever invented and the two terms generated from this story,"spiritual victory" and "Ah-Qism" are still in wide use in China nowadays.This thesis is to employ Andre Lefevere’s Rewriting Theory to make an analysis on two translations among the many English versions of Ah Q Zheng Zhuan. The two translations used as the study case are William A. Lyell’s version, a leading figure on the study of Lu Xun in America, who claims to be the first one to translate all of Lu Xun’s stories into the American branch of the language, and Julia Lovell’s, whose translation is thought to be the newest one of translations of Lu Xun’s works and also the most complete one for she is the first foreigner who has translated all the three short story collections of Lu Xun. After a comparative, descriptive and empirical study on the two English versions of Ah0Zheng Zhuan, the author proves that the three factors in Andre Lefevere’s Rewriting Theory do manipulate translators’translating strategy in a certain way and the influences by the three factors are not independent from each other, but linked with each other closely.