A Historical View Of Translation An Empirical Study On The Chinese Versions Of The Declaration Of Independence

In the post-structuralist era, language research and study go far beyond the analysis on language structures. With the development of modern media, social linguistics, applied linguistics, anthropology, cultural study, pragmatics, and cross-cultural communications, the translation theories appear to transit from detailed comparative analysis on language structure to a bold exploration in a broad language and cultural sense. This is a transition from a single subject study to a multi-angled, interdisciplinary study. Translation study has noticed not only different features of the two different languages in terms of phonemes, words, phrases, and sentences, but also some supra-language features such as cultural meanings in two different languages.Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere are two representatives of the cultural view of translation. They pointed out in their book Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation that"translation studies turned to ethnography and history and sociology to deepen the methods of analysing what happens to texts in the process of what we might call'intercultural transfer', or translation."(Bassnett, 2001:132)Lefevere listed a number of constraints in translation in his book Tanslation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook, namely ideology, patronage, cultural system, language development and education, central text and central culture.It is only one step to go from the cultural view to the historical view of translation studies. According to an introductory article published by Hu Zhen(胡真), the Balgarian translatian Anna Lilova posed a set of historical view in the explanation of all activities in translation process. She contends that translation is a product of history, a specific historical phenomenon, and a specific process. With the methodology of Marxist historical materialist view, she studied all respects of translation, among others, its definition, norm, criteria, and skill, etc. If we reconsider the purpose of translation in the historical view, again it is beyond the proliferaton of cultural communications, but, in addition to that, it is dynamyic in urging social changes. Translation is not only a re-presentation of the source text, but a re-creation by the translator corresponding to his own purposes and his social background. The constraints of translation are not an endless list of different aspects, but a historical setting functioning with social, economic, political, ideological, cultural and language factors as its subclasses. Historical limitations can usually be seen in translated texts.The historical view and the cultural view share some similarities, yet are fundamentally different. Both views set translation constraints in a combined set of language and non language factors. In other words, such constraints are not only language ones, but also an assembly of influences coming from society, history, and culture. The difference between the two views is that materialistic historical view regards social production as the dynamics of social development, while the cultural, political, and religious ideologies and conception are subsidiary factors fostering social changes. They are only used for explaining and organizing the activities for the change. While the cultural view had listed a series of such subsidiary influencing factors without touching the root of the dynamics. Say, suppose history serves as the context of translation studies, without considering history as a canvas, all other factors lose their foundation to perform.In order to find out the significance and the importance of the historical view, this article analyzed the language and supra-language factors of seven Chinese versions of The Declaration of Independence in a parellel comparison way. Comparisons are made in two different categories: language vs. non-language factors; diachronical vs. syn-chronical factors. The conclusion drawn from such comparisons is that history penetrates in every aspect of translation—from text selection, to language style, from translation criteria to equivalent texts in different languages, from translator to audience, from power of patronage to dynamics of change. I hope that more translation studies professionals will be attracted to this school of learning via my work. And hope that more discussions and debates over the historical view will lead it to a scientific explanation for translation activities.