A Descriptive Study Of The Translation Strategy Of Wei Cheng’s English Version From The Perspective Of Manipulation Theory

Since the1990s, western translation studies have broken through the constraint of linguistics and have entered the field of cultural research. And Andre Lefevere is one of the important representatives. He thinks that translation is not only influenced by language itself, but also manipulated by many other factors such as social, cultural, political and economic elements. Thus, he proposes manipulation theory for analyzing translation activities scientifically and descriptively from the aspects of poetics, ideology and patronage. As a milestone of translation studies, the theory transforms the prescriptive way, which was widely used to study translation phenomena before, into a descriptive way that has become a new channel for interpreting translation works.Fortress Besieged, the English version of Ch’ien Chung-shu’s masterpiece Wei Cheng (《围城》), was co-translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao in the1960s. On account of the limitations of traditional translation theory, this thesis uses Lefevere’s manipulation theory to analyze how the three factors manipulated Jeanne Kelly&Nathan K. Mao’s translation strategy in translating Wei Cheng, trying to view this book more objectively and comprehensively.This thesis can be divided into six parts. Part one is the introduction of this thesis, which briefly presents the background and the purpose of the research, the method, the scope and the significance of this research.Part two is literature review, functioning as the foundation of this thesis. In this part, Wei Cheng’s English version and previous studies of it are briefly introduced. Because of the limitations of previous researches on it, the present thesis proposes a new approach to the study of Wei Cheng’s translation.Part three offers an overview of manipulation theory, which is the theoretical basis of the thesis. The origin, the development and the main points of the theory are briefly reviewed.Part four is a sampling survey of the culture-loaded words in Wei Cheng’s English version, trying to analyze its major translation strategy—foreignization by comparing the source text and target text. This part also uses examples to interpret how this kind of translation strategy is achieved.Part five analyzes the translation strategy employed in Wei Cheng’s English version in the framework of manipulation theory. After reviewing the TL country—United States’social circumstances in the1960s, this thesis analyzes the characteristics of politics, society, culture and poetics in that period. Based on that, the author further analyzes how the translation strategy of Wei Cheng’s English version was manipulated by the poetics, the ideology and patronage during that period.The last part is the conclusion of the whole thesis.After this research, this thesis finds that the translation of Wei Cheng was indeed manipulated by the poetics, the ideology and patronage during that time and therefore gives a sufficient explanation that why foreignization was adopted by the translators as the major translation strategy. And this thesis further indicates that translation is a communication activity between different languages and cultures. The selection of translation strategies in translation works is not only constrained by the translators but also by the social circumstances. Therefore, it is reasonable to study translation works under the background of a certain society or time, and only in this way can a comparatively objective research result be achieved.