A Study On Translating Strategies Of Zha Liangzheng’s Version Of Don Juan From The Ideological Perspective

Zha Liangzheng(Mu Dan)is a prominent poet and poem translator in China in the 20 th century.He is an outstanding example of “poets translating poems”,and his poem translations are renowned as “the best translations”.Zha’s English poem translation activities span from 1953 to 1977,coinciding with a unique period in the history of China,the 17 years after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China,from 1949 to 1966,and the ten years of the “Cultural Revolution”,from 1966 to 1976.During this period,as translation is under the extreme intervention and control of politics,the literary nature of literary translation as a form of literary recreation behaviors and translators’ subjectivity are completely erased.Therefore,Zha’s poem translation provides an excellent case for researching literary translation from the cultural perspective.Since the emergence of the Cultural Turn in translation studies in 1990 s,the influence of cultural elements and particularly ideology on translation has become a popular research topic.However,existing studies on Zha’s poem translation from the cultural perspective merely focus on finding extra-textural evidences to explore the influence of cultural elements on Zha’s translation,neglecting to analyze the texts of Zha’s translations.This study takes Zha’s translation of Don Juan as a case to investigate the influence that ideology has on his use of translation strategies.According to the Manipulation Model of Ideology upon Translation developed by Chen Shunyi(2016),which is based on Lefevere’s Rewriting Theory,ideology in translation can be divided into macro ideology and micro ideology which have different impacts on each procedure of translation.In terms of translation strategies,macro ideology influences a translator’s use of macro translation strategies by means of political ideology and poetics,and micro ideology affects the translator’s choice of micro translation strategies through the patron’s ideology and the translator’s ideology.On the basis of this framework,this study analyzes the characteristics of Zha’s use of macro and micro translation strategies and further examines how political ideology and poetics as well as the patron’s ideology and the translator’s ideology make a difference respectively in these two aspects.Through the critical discourse reading of Zha’s translation of Don Juan and the descriptive analysis of the four above mentioned ideological factors,the study finds: on the macro level,the translator uses the strategy of domestication to convert the language form of Don Juan,which is out of the requirement of the political ideology at that time,and he adopts the strategy of foreignization to translate the poetic form of the epic,which is out of the influence of the poetics back then;on the micro level,the translator’s use of translation strategies is featured by imitating the colloquial style in poetic language,taking stanzas as translation units,and using traditional cultural expressions,and the translator’s ideology is the dominant factor in the choice of these micro translation strategies.