A Study On The Translation Of Culture-specific Items From The Perspective Of Manipulation Theory

William Makepeace Thackeray was one of the most outstanding British critical realistic writers in the 19th century.His best-known work Vanity Fair has been popular since its first publication.In this masterpiece,Thackeray presented a vivid and real panorama of the life of western upper class and aristocrats in the beginning of 19th century.He criticized the corruption and venality of the upper social class with careful observation and profound sarcasm.In 20th century,Vanity Fair was introduced into China for the first time,and afterwards there appeared many Chinese versions.Ms.Yang Bi first translated this novel in 1957.Her translation was smooth and natural with vernacular language,so it gained a big success,and has become one of the best models among Chinese translations of foreign literature.Until the 1990s,the trend of re-translating Thackeray’s works came back,and brought appearance of various re-translated versions of Vanity Fair,among which Mr.Peng Changjiang’s and Mr.Rong Rude’s versions stood out.However,most of the researches on the translation of Vanity Fair gather on Yang Bi’s and Peng Changjiang’s versions,while Rong Rude’s translation has not obtained equal attention.As an experienced translator in Shanghai Translators Association,Rong Rude’s translation features elaborate and resplendent choice of words and wisely humorous style.His version of Vanity Fair was first published in 1999,and the new edition of it was published again in 2007.Rong’s version was 42 years later than Yang’s.Their translation styles and strategies adopted demonstrate evident differences,especially in the translation of culture-specific items in the original novel.Why did the two translators use different translation strategies?What factors at work lead to the differences?This thesis conducts a comparative study on the translation of the culture-specific items in Yang’s and Rong’s versions,and takes a closer look at the deep reasons causing the differences.Before the 1970s,Western translation theorists mainly adopted an artistic or linguistic approach,paying much attentions to the analysis between the original text and target text based on the evaluation criterion "faithfulness".However,since 1970s,translation studies became diversified.Some translation theorists started to reflect on the culture.That’s why the translation studies took the "cultural turn",demonstrating the rise of the Cultural School.Being regarded as the leading role in the Cultural School,Lefevere put forward the Manipulation Theory.He raised the idea that translation is rewriting,and rewriting is"manipulation",which usually aims to satisfy the need of dominant ideology and poetics in the target culture and some other cultural factors in the society.This thesis chooses the Manipulation Theory as the theoretical framework,using the two most important factors,ideology and poetics,which greatly affect translation.Through the comparison of translation of the culture-specific items in the two Chinese versions of Vanity Fair,the author strives to explore whether ideology and poetics have impact on translators’translation activities.The culture-specific items in the original novel are categorized into five types according to Eugene A.Nida’s classification of culture,which are ecological culture,material culture,social culture,religious culture and linguistic culture.Based on theories and facts,the conclusion has been drawn that translators in different historical times do perform their translation tasks under the influence of different ideological and poetic factors to some extent.The translators manipulate the ST in order to adapt their translations to the dominant ideology and poetics.This result provides evidence for the correctness of the Manipulation Theory,as well as its practicability,and also gives us the suggestion that we should not only learn translation from the linguistic level and artistic level,but also should take cultural factors into consideration.Nevertheless,in the process of studying the two translators’versions and their historical backgrounds and personal life experiences,it has been discovered that in some situations,translators’ choices are free of the control of cultural manipulation,that is to say,translators anti-manipulate the cultural factors.This also indicates that in spite of its feasibility,the Manipulation Theory has its limitation,as it cannot explain the translators’ subjective initiative.Therefore,translation is a result accelerated by the joint influence of external cultural constraints and the translator’s own subjectivity.The thesis is composed of seven chapters,as listed below:Chapter One introduces the research background,the purpose and significance of choosing this topic,the research questions to be solved,as well as the structure of the thesis.Chapter Two gives a detailed literature review of three topics in this thesis,which consists of three parts.The first part reviews the studies on Lefevere’s Manipulation Theory,including an overview of the main content in the Manipulation Theory,the previous studies on the Manipulation theory in the West and the studies in China.In the second part,a review on culture-specific items is provided.In this part,firstly,the definition of CSIs is explained.Secondly,Nida’s classification of five categories of culture is introduced.Lastly,studies on the translation of culture-specific items are also listed.The third part gives a review of the studies on the Chinese translations of Vanity Fair.Chapter Three presents the data collection and research methodology of the thesis.Chapter Four makes an detailed comparison of the translation of culture-specific items in the two Chinese versions of Vanity Fair.The CSIs in the original text are categorized into ecological culture,material culture,social culture,religious culture and linguistic culture according to Nida’s classification.Chapter Five makes a conclusion to Chapter Four.Based on the comparative study conducted in Chapter 4,here the author tries to summarize both the differences and similarities of the translation methods and strategies adopted by the two translators.Chapter Six analyzes the historical backgrounds under which the two Chinese versions were produced respectively,and compares the different dominant ideologies and poetics in the two eras,so as to find out how the differences of ideologies and poetics be reflected in the translation of CSIs in the two versions,thus to explore the deep reasons for translators’ choice of translation methods.What’s more,in this chapter,the two translators’ personal initiative subjectivity is studied to explain their anti-manipulation cases,which can’t be explained by the Manipulation Theory.Chapter Seven draws an overall conclusion of the thesis by clarifying the major findings,and also illustrates the limitations of this research.