A Contrastive Study On Chinese Versions Of The Wealth Of Nations In Socio-cultural Context

The Wealth of Nations is a bright pearl in the history of Western economics.Since the advent of The Wealth of Nations,it has been taken as the key work by the economics circle among nations to seek for the method of financial management.Just in the eighteenth century,there were ten English versions being released and dozens of languages spring up.So far,only the number of Chinese versions at home has been up to 37,not to mention its numerous studies.However,according to the analysis of the existing research,it is obvious to see that most of the studies adhere too closely to the interdisciplinary research and significance of the book,with little attention on translation studies.Among several translation studies,previous researches mainly focus on a version of The Wealth of Nations,especially Yan Fu's version or compare the original text with other versions based on the language level.However,those studies focusing on the interaction between translation and culture,influence and constraints of culture over translation are rarely explored.Nevertheless,the multiple translations of The Wealth of Nations can actually reveal the requirements of the readers and the general social and cultural situation of each era.Therefore,for the above limitations,this paper chooses three classical Chinese versions of The Wealth of Nations as the corpus from Yan Fu,Guo Dali and Wang Yanan,and Hu Changming respectively.It aims to probe into the relations between socio-cultural context of the period of time that translator lives in and different translation phenomena and characteristics of each version.That is to say,how does the translator achieve the reconstruction of source text under the guidance of socio-cultural context.This thesis provides the practical support for the fact that translation is never conducted in vacuum and it will inevitably root in the social and cultural context of the period of time.Influenced by the particular socio-cultural context,the translator always chooses to “rewrite” the text by means of “filtering” and “purifying” so as to adapt to the historical background,ideology,literary tradition and readers' expectations etc.of his/her time.Chapter one mainly moves around the research background,objective,significance,question,method as well as the framework.Chapter two summarizes the Chinese versions of The Wealth of Nations and has a brief overview of the previous studies,followed by the existing problems.Chapter Three gives a systematical introduction to the socio-cutural context,including the theories and classifications.Chapter Four and Chapter Five are the main body of this paper,which conduct a thorough exploration of translation phenomena of each version in its specific social and cultural context,aiming to probe into the relationships between them.Chapter Six draws the conclusion that translation is the rewriting of the source text in its specific social and cultural context.In addition to laying a solid material foundation for the study of the Chinese translation of The Wealth of Nations,this thesis provides a theoretical explanation for retranslation of the classic works in the future and deepens the practical significance of translation studies to some extent.