On Two English Translations Of Liaozhai

Within the framework of the cultural school of Translation Studies and with a study made on the two English versions of Liaozhai, produced separately by H. A. Giles and John Minford, the present study seeks to explore what factors influence and constrain the translators' strategies. In so doing, this thesis investigates both the objective socio-cultural factors, the position of target culture and that of the translated literature in its literary polysystem in particular and the translators' subjective cultural attitudes toward the cultural situation.Liaozhai was rendered by both translators into pleasant literary English. In the process, abridgement and simplification were made under the constraints of patronage and poetics. And what's more, both versions are also circumscribed by ideological constraints.The study has come to find that the greater the semantic and syntactic differences between the language systems are, the more likely the ideology of the translator is to interfere with the decoding process oftranslation.