| Emma, by Jane Austen, is a novel about youthful hubris and the perils of misconstrued romance and often seen as Austen’s most mature work in thinking and art. This novel is structured around love and marriage. The title character, Emma Woodhouse, gained a deep understanding of love and marriage through making matches for others.Polysystem theory was developed by Itamar Even-Zohar in1970s, and it is a theory of culture. It departs from the linguistic perspective and seeks to establish the cultural laws and conditions governing literary production. This thesis discusses, from the perspective of the polysystem theory, the translation of Emma by Professor Liu Chongde in terms of words and phrases, sentence patterns, and paragraph structures and compares Liu Chongde’s translation with that of Sun Zhili. The conclusion is that Professor Liu Chongde’s translation is in line with the "adequacy rule" put forward by Polysystem theory. However, some of Liu’s translation also reflects the "acceptability rule", which proves the subjectivity of translators when choosing translation strategies. |
