On The Translation Of Children’s Literature From The Perspective Of Manipulation

The experience and memory of one’s childhood play a very important role in shaping one’s characteristics and personality. To ensure children having a happy and healthy childhood, the reading materials as well as TV programs should be seriously chosen. In China, children’s reading materials come from more translated work than works produced by Chinese authors, so the study on the translation of children’s literature becomes very important. Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde are very popular fairy tales among Chinese children since Zhou Zuoren first translated The Happy Prince into China in1909. Wang Lin retranslated all the nine fairy tales by Oscar Wilde and published them in1996. The language of this version is very smooth and the translator elaborates the beauty and virtue in the original texts naturally.Since the70s and80s of last century, translation studies have developed quickly from a secondary status into an independent discipline. The advent of the poly-system theory and the cultural turn of translation studies provide a wider researching field for translation studies. Ander Lefevere proposed the manipulation theory under the influence of the poly-system theory and the cultural turn. He pointed out that the translation process was manipulated by the poetics, ideology and patronage.Under the guidance of Lefevere’s rewriting and manipulation theory, the author of this thesis devotes to showing how poetics, ideology and patronage manipulate the translation process by analyzing Wang Lin’s translation of Fairy tales of Oscar Wilde. The author reaches a conclusion that poetics manipulates the translation process in terms of the sentence patterns, punctuations and words, and ideology manipulates the translation process in terms of choosing the source text, translation purposes and translation strategies, and patronage doesn’t manipulate the translation process directly, but manipulates the translation process through poetics and ideology. It’s the patrons’ favorable poetics and ideology that translators should be subject to in the translation process. Under the manipulation of poetics, ideology and patronage, Wang Lin employs some specific methods to make the language in the translated text smooth and spread the virtue of the original texts as well as keep an exotic sense to attract children’s interest.