Ideological Manipulation In Sidney Shapiro’s Translation Of Rhymes Of Li Youcai

Rhymes of Li Youcai is a novel written by the famous peasant writer Zhao Shuli (1906-1970) in 1943. It mainly describes the sharp conflicts and struggles between the peasants and the landlords, and truthfully reflects the rural social life and the peasants’ spiritual outlook at that time. "Potato School" is one of the schools of Chinese contemporary novels, which formed in Shanxi rural areas in the 1950s. It occupies a pivotal position in modern Chinese literature. As the founder of the "Potato School", almost all of the works of Zhao Shuli are highly regarded and win widespread praise. After its publication, Rhymes of Li Youcai caused a strong sensation in the whole liberated areas, which refers to the democratic anti-Japanese base areas under the leadership of the communist party. And then it was highly evaluated by the masters in Chinese literature, such as Guo Moruo and Mao Dun.Sidney Shapiro (1915-2014), born in a Jewish family in the United States, makes great contributions to the promotion of the translation career in China and exchanges between Chinese and foreign cultures. Many of his translations are the only English version of Chinese literary works that are introduced to the west. His translation of Outlaws of the Marsh is regarded as the most authoritative English translation, which is included in the Library of Chinese Classics published by Foreign Languages Press. In 1950, the novel Rhymes of Li Youcai was translated into English by Sidney Shapiro, and it was republished several times in the next thirty years. However, little research has been done on the translation of the novel.According to Andre Lefevere, translation is a rewriting manipulated by ideology and poetics, which directly determines the translation strategy that the translator chooses to use. Under the ideological manipulation, in the English version of Rhymes of Li Youcai, Sidney Shapiro adds, omits, replaces or generalizes the original text in the process of translation for several times. Therefore, as a typical example, the English version of this novel definitely deserves our attention and study.On the basis of Lefevere’s Rewriting Theory, the thesis tries to explore Sidney Shapiro’s translation of Zhao Shuli’s representative work Rhymes of Li Youcai from the perspective of ideological manipulation. Through a large amount of comparative analysis of the original text and the target text, the author attempts to probe into Sidney Shapiro’s translation strategies under the influence of the dominant ideology and the translator’s own ideology, aiming to have guiding significance to the research and practice of literary translation.All in all, through the detailed research of Sidney Shapiro’s translation of Rhymes of Li Youcai, a conclusion can be drawn that Sidney Shapiro’s translation of Rhymes of Li Youcai is an outcome influenced and manipulated by the dominant ideology and the translator’s own ideology, which proves the validity of the Manipulation Theory.