Report On Translation Of Monocular Telescope Based On Manipulation Theory

Contemporary Chinese novel Monocular Telescope of 145,000 words written by well-known writer Feng Jicai,was available in market in February 2019.The novel tells a tragic cross-cultural love affair that is set in a historical context--Boxers’Uprising that broke out at the turn of the 20^thcentury.It involves many fields such as Chinese history,culture,religion,and folklore by quaint and delicate language and smooth narrations.It is also related to the collision of Chinese ideology and culture with Western counterparts.Since there is no English version and at least twenty translated works of Feng had been published abroad,its translation into English is of some value,though it is not a bed of roses.This thesis is a translation report on why and how the novel as source text is translated.Source textual features are summarized as follows:wide use of culture-loaded words,frequent use of rhetoric devices,occasional use of Tianjin dialectal expressions,interspersed use of Boxers’slogans,alternate use of narratives and dialogues.Source text features requires much attention in translation.This translation practice is under the guidance of Manipulation Theory of AndréLefevere,based on those source text features and target readership.Lefevere believes that translating,histography,anthologization,criticism and editing are kinds of rewriting,and that translation acts as the most obviously recognizable type of rewriting,potentially the most influential as it can project the image of an author and/or a（series of）work（s）in another culture and even lift that author and his/her work（s）beyond the boundaries of their culture of origin.Treating translation as a special kind of rewriting,the translator of this translation practice is mainly manipulated by three factors:ideology,poetics and patronage.This report is based on the three core concepts of Manipulation Theory.The translator sets a possible scenario that the translated version could hopefully be published overseas.According to the above five source text features,considering particular goals,five flexible translation strategies at lexical,syntactic and discourse levels are employed in the translation process:（1）there is a combination of transliteration and literal translation and free translation for culture-loaded words;（2）some Boxers’slogans are deleted,some reduced to ones without much ideological sensitivity;（3）merits of both Chinese and English figures of speech are integrated so as to reproduce the appeal of the original beauty of language;（4）almost all of Tianjin dialectal expressions are flexibly translated into formal or informal target language,since they are merely a few;（5）the translator is also manipulated by the patronage--rewriting in favor with patronage by replacing narratives with dialogues in order to substitute vivid dialogues for conspicuous but maybe monotonous narratives and replacing soliloquy from the omniscient point of view with direct speech that can more straightforwardly give full vent to the inner feelings in the first person.