A Study Of Kuang Yi In The Late Ming Dynasty From The Perspective Of Textual Traveling

As the world's classic fable stories, Aesop's Fables has been translated into many languages. Aesop's Fables was introduced into China a long time ago and the earliest version could date back to the Ming Dynasty. Kuang Yi is the first Chinese translation of Aesop's Fables, and then there appear many other different translations with the development of the history. The introduction of Aesop's Fables has added fresh elements to the development of Chinese fables.Based on Said's traveling theory, this paper attempts to study the relationship between textual traveling and the deformation of the translation. Combined with the English version of the classics The Complete Fables that is popular among people, the thesis has a comparative analysis of the English version and its Chinese translation Kuang Yi during the Ming Dynasty from the perspective of textual traveling theory, which includes the selection of translation materials, translation strategies and translation style. The thesis discusses the deformation process of Aesop's Fables in the traveling of translation and the acceptance of the deformed texts to further explore the reasons of text deformation and its impact on the development of Chinese fables after deformation. The thesis comes to the conclusion that translation is a journey where a text will be inevitably influenced by local history, culture and other ideological factors. It will certainly be deformed in order to be accepted by the target readers in the traveling process of translation. And the deformation itself will have an impact on the target language.