A Study Of Dong Leshan’s Translation Style

Dong Leshan, a master of both English and Chinese, was a senior and responsible translator and scholar true to the name. He had made an indelible contribution to the Chinese translation history, his translated works were more than20and his Nineteen Eighty-Four won "the Outstanding Translation Award in Guangdong region". As a famous translator, Dong Leshan made great contributions to the field of translation and admired by Chinese readers, but the study of his translation style is rare to see. This thesis is intended to explore Dong Leshan’s translation style in his main work Nineteen Eighty-Four from Even-Zohar’s Polysystem theory.Nineteen Eighty-Four is George Orwell’s most famous novel, it is a political classic about totalitarianism, which is known as the world’s most famous anti-utopia science fiction and political allegory novel. It was rewarded the top list of "The Most Influential Literary Work in the Twentieth Century". It has been translated into more than60languages, printed publication over40million copies. Dong Leshan’s Chinese version of Nineteen Eighty-Four is considered as his most representative translated work. Dong Leshan’s translation style is fully embodied in this novel.Itamar Even-Zohar is an Israeli scholar, he advocated that putting translation into a large socio-cultural polysystem for study and brought forth polysystem theory in the1970s. This theory is a new perspective for translation study. He believes that translated literature as a separate subsystem in the literature with other systems co-exist in the a macro socio-cultural polysystem. This translation strategy or translation technique that translators take areinfluenced by his specific historical period of social and cultural factors and status oftranslated literature in a definite historical period. When translated literature in the targetphilology marginalized, the translator focus on the acceptability of the translated text in thetarget language culture. Then the translator in the translation process tends to follow thetranslation norms and translation strategy of existing in literary translation.In this thesis, the author will using the polysystem theory and taking Dong Leshan’stranslated work Nineteen Eighty-Four as a case study, to doing a further research on DongLeshan’s translation style, which combines with his socio-cultural polysystem and uses themethodology of analysis and synthesis. At last, the thesis gets a conclusion that a translatorwould inevitably demonstrate his unique translation style, which results from various kinds ofinternal and external factors which should be paid attention to and hoping that this will makesome contributions to the further study of the translation style.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one clarifies the lead in, reasons andsignificance for the selection of the topic as well as methodology and the layout of this thesis.Chapter two is a literature review about polysystem theory and Dong Leshan’s translation athome and abroad. Chapter three is theoretical basis for the thesis. As the major body of thethesis, chapter four introduce the original author and the work Nineteen Eighty-Four, analysisDong Leshan’s translation style from his personal experience, characters as well associal-historical circumstances he lives in and his major translation thoughts from theperspective of polysystem theory. At last, after analyzing his translation work NineteenEighty-Four and conclude Dong Leshan’s translation style. Chapter five is conclusion.