A Study Of The English Translations Of "Guo Feng" In Shi Jing From The Perspective Of Andre Lefevere’s Rewriting Theory

Shi Jing, also known as "Three Hundred Poems", compiled by Confucius, including305poems dating from the early West Zhou Dynasty to the middle Spring and Autumn Period, was the first anthology of poems in China and regarded as one of the five canons in ancient China. It is a gem of ancient Chinese literature."Guo Feng", the first and the most important part of Shi Jing, contains one hundred and sixty poems collected from fifteen countries and regions of ancient China, many of which have become popular idioms and have always attracted attention among scholars and translators.The Cultural Turn in translation studies began in1970s, with various new theories such as Skopos Theory and Polysystem Theory. It is a breakthrough from the constraint of traditional translation studies, which tend to focus on the linguistic level or the fidelity of the translation. This new approach has greatly broadened the theoretical scope of translation studies and placed the translation study in a broader context of cultural, social and historical conditions, which offers a brand new perspective for study. Andre Lefevere’s Rewriting Theory is an important approach to translation studies. According to Andre Lefevere,"Translation is a rewriting of an original text", three factors, namely, ideology, poetics and patronage play essential roles in the process of translation as a way of rewriting. Thus he took the characteristics of the times into consideration and accentuated the significance of cultural and social factors in the process of translation, which facilitated the development of the Cultural Turn.Therefore, this thesis is an attempt to study the English translation of Shi Jing from the perspective of Andre Lefevere’s rewriting theory. In this thesis, various English versions of "Guo Feng" in the book Shi Jing are selected from both Chinese and foreign translators and a comparative analysis is conducted from the perspective of ideology and poetics in macro and micro levels to discuss the causes for such differences. Since the classical poetry and literature contain the virtues of Chinese traditional culture and ideology, the study of Shi Jing translation can contribute to the promotion of Chinese civilization and facilitate the cultural exchange between China and the western world.