A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of The Scarlet Letter In Perspective Of Manipulation Theory

According to Lefevere, translation is rewriting of the source text. All rewritingsmanifest a certain ideology and poetics which manipulate or influence literary worksto function in a given society in a given way. Translators always change the originaltexts to some extent so as to comply with the mainstream ideology and poetics. Onlyin this way can the translated version pass the official inspection smoothly and beaccepted by most readers.Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter has long been considered as aclassic both at home and abroad. Published in1850, the novel tells the story about theprotagonist Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an adulterous affair andtries hard to start a new life of regret and dignity. Due to its important position in thehistory of world literature, it has already been translated into many different kinds offoreign languages. According to the materials available, there are up to34differentChinese versions. The present study attempts to make a comparative study of twoChinese versions (Han Shiheng’s version in1954and Yao Naiqiang’s version in1996)of The Scarlet Letter from the perspective of Manipulation Theory.Through comparison, this thesis holds that ideology and poetics in differenthistorical times influence translators’ philosophy of translation and their translationstrategies. For the same original work to be translated, translators of different timestend to have obvious differences in the selection of lexicon, syntax and even the textstructure. Han’s version manifests more about the manipulation of political ideologythan Yao’s version. But in Yao’s version, the trace of socialist ideology is not thatobvious since this version came out under the spring breeze of reform and opening-uppolicy blowing across the country. Owing to the different periods of time governed bytheir ideology and poetics, Han and Yao tend to translate The Scarlet Letter differentlyin text making. In terms of the average sentence length, Han’s version is longer thanYao’s, indicating that Han adopts to take the literal translation strategy while Yao is inclined to use free translation strategy. At the structural level, Han deletes the prefacewhile Yao retains it, which can be inferred that the poetics factors, including thechanged status of American literature and scholars’ views on the significance of thepreface play an important role in translation.Besides the Introduction and Conclusion parts, the present thesis is composed ofthree chapters. The first chapter is the literature review concerned with The ScarletLetter and its translation. Chapter Two introduces the theoretical foundation of thestudy–the Manipulation Theory. Chapter Three is the main part of the thesis,analyzing the two Chinese versions of The Scarlet Letter from the perspective ofManipulation Theory, and explaining the different translation strategies adopted bythe translators.