Study On The Chinese Translation Of The Science Fiction True Names From The Perspective Of The Rewriting Theory

Over the past four decades,rapid progress has been made in translation research and,as a result,perspectives on translation studies have also been diversified.According to AndréLefevere,a representative of the manipulation school,translation is not only a linguistic shift but also a cultural rewriting of the original work by the translator.He shifted his focus to the role of the translation in the target language culture,and paid more attention to the social and cultural factors in the target language that affect the translation,which provided a new perspective for translation studies.Vernor Vinge is a well-known American hard science fiction writer who has won several Hugo Awards,the highest award in science fiction,and his early masterpiece True Names is a very forward-looking computer science fiction novella,which has been highly praised by famous science fiction writers at home and abroad.Based on a detailed comparative reading of the English original and the serialized translation of the novella True Name,the author of this thesis,with the help of Lefevere’s rewriting theory,first categorizes and analyzes the phenomena of rewriting in the Chinese translation.Taking into account patronage,ideology and poetics,the three elements exercising the greatest influence on the phenomenon of rewriting,the author of the thesis attempts to explain the reasons for rewriting in the translation,as well as to summarize the means of rewriting,that is,the methods of translation.Through exemplification,the thesis concludes that the rewritings in the translation of the novella True Names can be mainly divided into rewritings at the macro level and rewritings at the micro level.The former mainly includes chapter division and visual design of the Chinese translation,which are mainly manipulated by patronage;and the latter is the language-level rewritings,which are mainly influenced by ideology and by dominant poetics respectively.The language-level rewritings in this thesis are made mainly through the translation strategy of domestication and liberal translation,specifically by techniques such as additional translation,changing the emotional color of the wording,and changing the rhetorical device.The positive effect of the rewritings in the translation is that the translated version is more in line with the reading habits of the target readers and thus the reading experience of the readers is improved.However,the regret is that the rewritings slightly distorted the characters,and so they are not as full as those in the original work.In conclusion,a descriptive study of the Chinese translation of science fiction True Names by using Lefevere’s rewriting theory can enrich the diversity of the current research on the translation of science fiction and is expected to provide some thoughts and references for future science fiction translations.