A Comparative Study On Two Chinese Versions Of Uncle Tom's Cabin From The Perspective Of Effective History

This dissertation intends to make a descriptive textual analysis of the Chinese translations of Uncle Tom's Cabin rendered by Lin Shu in 1900s and Zhang Peijun in 1980s respectively. Based on the theoretical concept of effective history, changes of meaning will be observed in terms of temporal deferral, with its focus upon differences between the two versions plus the reasons behind in history, so that the necessity of re-translations can be defended and the efforts of the translators at different historical periods will be thus recognized for their each contribution to literary creation and development as well as the enlightenment on humanity in the society of the time.Hermeneutics emerged from the philosophical discussions in ancient Greek. Along its evolvement in the long history, it has been gradually associated with the interpretation of literature. As the abstract meaning awakening readers'echo on the layer of esthetics can be interpreted as one that is both similar to and different from the original meaning, Gadamer defines the phenomenon in his hermeneutics as fusion of subjects'horizons. The fusion of horizons is essentially a question of time. Therefore, the concept of effective history comes into being as the core in fusions of horizons and meaning changes. Uncle Tom's Cabin was firstly translated into Chinese by Lin Shu and his cooperator as a political novel in the semi-feudal and semi-colonial society of China. After that, there had been no complete versions any more until the second thriving period of literary translation in CHN came forward. As one of the two versions published in the same year, Zhang Peijun's version, which shares the same title with Lin Shu's version, has been neglected by most of the researchers, only because it fails to cater for the public taste with a bunch of foreignization strategies. However, aspects like the number of words, the annotations and the translator's attitude reflected in the preface have implied preliminarily that it deserves much more attention in translation studies.The thesis has discovered that effective history can be relied on as a general philosophical basis for the hermeneutical interpretation of differences presented in the comparison of the two versions. The choice they made in the translations with their own poetical and political beliefs, together with their selections of genre and narrative mode, handling of characters'dialogues, figures of speech etc., can be sufficiently explained by effective history. Consequently, from this study of the translations, what the two translators have done for the translated literature and Chinese literature as a whole will be revealed in a more direct and insightful sense and their efforts made for literary recreation will be recognized; hence the enhancement of the translators' status in Chinese literary history.