Re-presentation Of Afghanistan Cultural Identity In Li Jihong’s Chinese Translation Of The Kite Runner From The Perspective Of Manipulation Theory

The Kite Runner written by the Afghan American writer Khaled Hosseini has won great attention since its first publication and has been translated into more than forty languages.As the story was set in Afghanistan social contexts over three decades,it is rich in local customs and religions and presents unique cultural identity of Afghanistan during in that special period of war time.Considering the cultural shift in translation studies,no good translation can be done without understanding the cultural background of the source and the target texts.As a cross-cultural interpretation by an Afghanistan student learning in China,this thesis,from the perspective of manipulation,examines how Afghanistan’s cultural identity is re-presented in the Chinese translation of The Kite Runner by Li Jihong.The research questions to be addressed are as follows: 1)what features of Afghanistan cultural identity representation can be found in the Chinese translation? And what translation strategies does the translator adopt to achieve such identity representation? 2)What manipulation factors can be found behind these identity representation and translation strategies?By comparing the Chinese translated version with the original text,it has been found that the Chinese version portrays the Afghanistan culture and cultural identity with great efforts.Features of Afghanistan cultural identity representation can be concluded as follows:(1)Cultural identity embedded in customs is represented from aspects of foods,dressing,ceremonies and local games as significant local Afghanistan culture carriers,but the cultural meaning in them has not been fully expressed.(2)Representation of religious cultural identity explains specific Islamic ideology,but due to the lack of equivalence wording,some religious identity is lost.(3)Cultural identity in terms of politics is represented with efforts to provide the political contexts and negative images of communism in the original work have been carefully deleted in the Chinese translation.(4)Cultural identity is represented from the aspects of sports as part of traditional Afghanistan culture,though the translation has not fully expressed the traditional culture rooted in the sports.(5)Cultural identity is also found in the translation of old poems with some unique style representative of cultural identity in Afghanistan.To achieve the above identity representation,translation strategies like deletion,omission and annotations are adopted.The finding shows that the extraordinary loyalty of the translator to the target culture has rendered the Chinese translation not as faithful to the original text as possible.Manipulation aspects like ideology and patronage exert influence on the above features of identity representation in the Chinese translation of the book,and poetics issue like the lack of culture words in the target language is also a factor of manipulation.