Back-translation Norms Under Ethnological Influences

In recent years,textless back-translation has gradually become the focus of back-translation studies.However,text-based back-translation studies remain a virgin land,which makes current back-translation norms and strategies very limited.This thesis is aimed at extracting text-based back-translation norms and analyzing the back-translator’s ideology with a descriptive method.China’s Gentry includes many short articles written by the Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong and was translated into English by Margaret Park Redfield,wife of Robert Redfield,an American anthropologist,in 1950s.Later,the English version was translated back into Chinese by Zhao Xudong,a Chinese anthropologist in Renmin University of China.Afterwards,the English translation and the Chinese back-translation were compiled into an inter-linear version.Since the work boasts high literariness and many writing styles,the back-translation strategies are diversified.In chapter one,new terminologies related to text-based back-translation will be defined and analyzed,and text-based and textless back-translations are essentially the same.Chapter two will be devoted to comparisons between original texts,English translation and back-translation,and to how these three sources contribute to the diversity of strategies,and further to the hybridization of the back-translation.In chapter three,norms will be extracted from the comparisons in chapter two and the statements of the back-translator and relevant editors.The research shows that text-based back-translation is more than restoring the original texts,and that the back-translator applied the method of ethnographic writing to producing text-based back-translation,which is made into recorders of both original texts and source translation activities.