A Comparative Study Of The Four Chinese Versions Of The Joy Luck Club

For a long time, translation studies have laid more stress on the linguistic level in which both language analysis and text comparison are counted as the main task. Along with the frequent international exchanges, it has been realized that translation studies conducted from language comparison only would be stuck in linguistic formalism, therefore, more importance should be attached in translation studies to the social-cultural, political, economic and other factors behind translation activities. And on this basis, in the1990s, Andre Lefevere, one of the prime representatives of the school of cultural translations in America and Susan Bassnett, a renowned English scholar, initiated the "cultural turn" in translation studies together, which breached the traditional comparative studies of translation that only emphasized the linguistic level and considered the translators to be under the influence of social-cultural and political constraints. They held that translation studies are as a matter of fact the cultural reciprocal study. What’s more, Andre Lefevere advanced rewriting theory that renovated the traditional translation research pattern, in which literary translation is regarded as rewritings of the original manipulated by ideologies, poetics and patronage, and the translator’s subjectivity is underlined. With the expanding role and influence of the school of cultural translations, its theory has also provoked interest and attention of Chinese translation field. The present research is based on the context of "cultural turn" in the field of translation studies and the framework of Andre Lefevere’s rewriting theory. This thesis studies four representative Chinese versions of The Joy Luck Club written by the famous Chinese American woman writer Amy Tan from synchronic and diachronic perspectives, i.e. the mainland translator Cheng Naishan’s two versions in1999and2006and the Taiwanese translator Yu Renrui’s two versions in1990and2008, as well as attempts to answer the following questions:Why did the four versions display such different characteristics, including differences of the two versions between the mainland and Taiwan by horizontal comparison, and differences of the two respective versions by Cheng and Yu by longitudinal comparison? What are the major factors of influencing the four versions? How do these factors manipulate these versions?The study found that:all of the four versions are the joint product of ideologies, poetics and patronage, and the impacts of these social-cultural factors on different linguistic levels of translations do not always follow the same tendency. On the whole, their manipulations on lexical level are stronger than on syntactic and discourse level. However, according to the text study from both horizontal and longitudinal comparative analysis, some similarities on the linguistic level of the four translations can be found, which fully embodies the historical background with the same root, common ancestor, and the same culture between the mainland and Taiwan, and reflects that Chinese translators’manipulation of versions intentionally and unintentionally has become clear as the influence of Chinese culture is increasingly powerful.