A Study Of Tianyanlun By Yan Fu From The Perspective Of Ideology And Poetics

Translation has traditionally been regarded as a matter of linguistic transfer, dismissing extralinguistic factors out of its field. In recent years, translation studies has broken through the barriers of pure linguistics. As the ground has shifted from linguistic theory to sociology, translation has been studied from a macroscopic view, taking other factors into consideration, which leads to a fresh worldwide bloom in translation studies. Towards the end of 1980s, translation studies began to take a "cultural turn" and put translation in a larger political, cultural and historical context, providing new perspectives for the study of translation. With interdisciplinary tendency, more and more attention has been focused on translation process. Instead of being simply regarded as an end product, translation is a rather complicated process subject to the influences of various intralinguistic and extra linguistic factors.Lefevere , a famous translation theorist, argues that translation is a rewriting of the source text subject to ideological and poetical constraints. The former cast influences in respect of politics, economy and social status, the latter in respect of linguistic level. Accordingly, translators adjust the source text to bring the target text in line with the dominant ideology and poetics. On the basis of his translation theory, this thesis attempts to reassess Yan Fu's translation work Tianyanlun (天演论) and his translation agenda in the context of the historical socio-cultural and political crisis in which China found itself at the time. The approach is descriptive rather than prescriptive. An in-depth analysis reveals that Yan Fu's infidelity to "faithfulness" principle proposed by himself is ideologically motivated .He chose Huxley's Evolution and Ethics as the source text for the purpose of race preserving (保种) and national salvation (救国) by the introduction of "struggle for existence and survival of the fittest" It is argued that from Yan Fu's perspective, his sincere purpose of national salvation through translation would only be achieved when his select readership had understood and accepted his sincerity through his deployment of an accessible poetics and the acculturation of otherwise inaccessible foreign ideas.The case study of Yan Fu's translation works proves the validity of Lefevere's theory that translation is rewriting at the request of different audiences in different times, places and cultures . It comes to the conclusion that the best way for future translation studies lies in the combination of a microscopic approach such as the intrinsic study of language transfer and a macroscopic one such as the extrinsic study of ideological manipulation .Meanwhile, it argues that as an indispensable factor in translations studies, the manipulation of ideology is relative rather than absolute ,and it should not outweigh language and pan-ideology tendency should be guarded against.