On The Traces Of Rewriting In Xue Yi'e And Chen Jialin's Ya Mei Nv Shi Bie Zhuan: A Cultural Perspective

In light of Lefevere's theory of rewriting, the present thesis sets XueYi'e and Chen Jialin's translation of Little Dorrit to the wider social context and analyzes the factors influencing the translation, mainly the rewritings in the Chinese version. By comparing the three major elements of novel between the original and the translation, the present paper is aimed to discover the traces of rewriting in the translation and then further analyze those factors which influenced the translation.To be more specific, in Chapter Two, the thesis investigates the rewritings of characterization in the translated text. In this part, both rewritings of direct definition and indirect presentation are examined. In direct definition, a character's trait is presented directly by the narrator's judgment and the judgment by other characters in the novel. It can be approached by the specific choice of diction. In the Chinese version, the translators often intended to make intervention in the aspect and thus the image of characters in the original was deformed in the target text. In the study of rewritings of indirect presentation, character's physical description, behavior, language and psychological description are covered.In Chapter Three, the thesis focuses on the rewritings of plot in the Chinese version. In this part, the author first takes a look at the translator's macro-control of the original text and analyzes the factors hidden behind the translators' rewritings. Then the author examines the translators' intervention in the subplots. It can be seen that the translators often made reinforcement of the loose plot and purposefully weakened the subplots incompatible with the target culture. Last, the author investigates the translators' rewriting of the layout of the original plot.Chapter Four has two parts. The first part deals with the translators' rewritings of the natural settings. Western and Chinese people have different ways and principles in describing their natural environment. And these differences will inevitably exert influence on the translator's personal ideology. The personal ideology together with the dominant poetics will in turn affect his translation strategy. In the second part, the author tries to make discoveries of the translators' rewritings of the social settings. In this section, the rewritings of religion and ethics are examined.From the above analyses, we now realize that rewritings in translation are not accidental and they result from the conflict and negotiation between two different cultures in a given context. In such a communicative process, the extra-linguistic factors are doomed to play a manipulative role in the practice of translation. Thus translation is not merely shifts on language level, rather it is a socio-cultural product, which is always in various constraints, especially the ideological and poetical ones. Ideology and poetics are the two factors that basically determine the image of a work of literature as projected by a translation.As for the rewritings in XueYi'e and Chen Jialin's translated text, two major factors exert their influence on the translators. That is, the translators' personal ideology and the dominant poetics in the late Qing period. A translator's personal ideology is closely related to the ideology of a society or culture. Usually, the dominant ideology tends to exert influences on the translator and thus pose influences on the translators' practice. However, the translator has the liberty to accept or reject the ideologies in the society or culture. With regard to Chen Jialin and Xue Yi, based on the analysis above, the two translators intended to accept the ideologies of the target culture and thus together with the ideologies of the target culture, their personal ideologies exert much influence on their subconscious and conscious rewritings of the original text.Besides the translator's personal ideologies, the dominant poetics of the time also exert much influence on their rewritings of the original text. In the late Qing period it seemed that the entertaining function of literature was reduced to the minimum due to the projection of the educational function. If we take the reader's reception into consideration, however, it can be seen that the entertaining function is actually far more powerful and influential than the educational function. As a result, both the created and translated novels of the time attached much importance to providing an attractive plot for the readers and at the same time those physical description and psychological description were often omitted or abridged in Xue and Chen's translation of Little Dorrit.