A Study On Yang Qishen’s Translation Of A Rose For Emily From The Perspective Of Manipulation Theory

This paper, based on theory of Manipulation School, tries to examine how the factors of ideology and poetics manipulate Yang Qishen’s translation of A Rose for Emily, written by William Faulkner. The novel A Rose for Emily was written in 1930s and Yang Qishen translated it in 1980s. The Manipulation School that this paper applied, represented by Andre Lefevere and Susan Bassnett, called on translation scholars to consider the influences and constraints of target society and cultural factors on translation, exploring translation in a broader cultural context. Lefevere put forward three manipulation factors that are ideology, poetics and patronage. The manipulation of patronage is a kind of ideological manipulation and usually reflects the dominant ideology of society.Ideology is an integration of ideas, beliefs and values that order people’s actions in certain society, therefore exerting a direct impact on the work done in the translation process. This paper, in the third chapter, examines the manipulation of ideology on translation from two stages, one in stage before translation, such as how ideological manipulation influences translators’choice of texts and of translating strategy, and one in the stage during translating practice such as how ideological manipulation influences translators’understanding and interpretation of texts. The manipulation of ideology on Yang’s translation reflects in such aspects that Yang has a preference to translate American and English literature, and he tried to translate concepts, ideas, plots and ways of expression faithfully. On the other hand, he still eliminated some radicalness of source text that cannot be accepted in Chinese society.Poetics is about the art of language, consisting of literary devices, motif, genres, and about the role of literature in the social system as a whole. This paper, in chapter four, examines the manipulation of poetics on the translation at lexical, syntactical and textual levels. The lexical level discusses the translator’s word choice; syntactical level discusses the transformations that translator made to the sentence structure of source text and the textual level discusses the overall style of translation. The manipulation of poetics on Yang’s translation shows that:with solid foundation of English study and years of formal education, Yang tended to use set phrases, idioms and complex sentence structures. The style of Yang’s translation was plain, consistent with his writing style that has formed through years of practice, although he tried to remain the foreignness of source text.Through this paper, we can see that some translation phenomena can be better explained when being put in a broader context of culture, society and history and that this theory of Manipulation Studies has its practical significance and can be applied into English to Chinese translation, which provides a fresh theoretical framework for translation studies and for the study of this novel. It is hoped that present studies pay more attention on the Manipulation School and on the cultural and social factors of translation studies.