A Comparative Study On Two English Translations Of Chen Zhong De Chi Bang From Bourdieu’s Sociological Perspective

Translation is a social activity.As the main participant of the activity,the translator,while giving full play to his subjectivity,is also influenced by various social factors to a certain extent.Therefore,translators’ choice of both source text and translation strategies has been branded with the social imprint.In recent years,the sociology furnishes translation studies with a new angle,especially Bourdieu’s sociological theory,which has been widely borrowed into translation studies to explain and analyze translation activities and translators.Chen Zhong De Chi Bang is a full-length reform novel written by Zhang Jie,a contemporary female writer.Zhang takes the reform of heavy industry as the background and focuses on the struggle between the reformists and conservatives.In addition,the independence and unyielding spirits of women in the new era and the life of the ordinary people are all described with great significance.The novel is endowed with high literary and social value.In 1985,it won the second Mao Dun Literature Prize and was translated into 12 languages,including English,French,German,Russian and Spanish.Within two years,two English versions were successively published,namely Glady Yang’s Leaden Wings（1987）and Howard Goldblatt’s Heavy Wings（1989）.By virtue of Bourdieu’s sociological theory,the thesis will explore the influence of field,capital and habitus on the two translators’ translation strategies.First of all,the thesis sorts out the domestic and foreign research on Chen Zhong De Chi Bang and its two English versions,and then summarizes three core concepts of Bourdieu’s sociological theory--“field” “habitus” and “capital”.Then,with the help of Bourdieu’s sociological theory,the author studies the two translators and their versions from both macro and micro perspectives.At the macro level,the differences of the two translators’ fields（particularly literary field）and their capitals（cultural capital,social capital and symbolic capital）are analyzed,and then the formation of their habitus is discussed by teasing out their social trajectories.At the micro level,the thesis first analyzes reasons why the two translators choose Chen Zhong De Chi Bang as source text,and then probes into the differences in translation strategies between the two versions from three levels: lexical level,textual level and paratextual level.In terms of lexical level,this thesis mainly examines the cultural-specific items in Chen Zhong De Chi Bang.In order to make the version more readable,Gladys Yang mainly adopts two translation methods: deletion and free translation,while Goldblatt primarily employs free translation and transliteration to transform the essence of Chinese culture.As for the textual level,the author compares the two versions from the following four aspects: descriptions on politics,descriptions on women,descriptions on minor characters and descriptions on narrators’ commentary.Focusing on the female images in the text,Gladys Yang implements positive descriptions to build more appreciable female characters,but for other three aspects,deletion is her primary choice.Howard Goldblatt,relatively faithful to the original text,gives priority to literal translation,and pays attention to convey the artistic representation of the source text.From the point of paratextual level,the prefaces and the list of characters are investigated thoroughly.In the preface,Gladys Yang not only introduces the author Zhang Jie and the main female images in the novel but also invites Delia Davin to write an afterword,while Goldblatt only gives a brief introduction of the text.Besides,Gladys Yang also establishes a list of characters centered on female characters but Goldblatt doesn’t intervene it.