On Hybridity In Translated Novels In The Late Qing Dynasty And Early Republic Of China(1898-1919)

"Hybrid" was originally a term borrowed from biology, but then its uses were scattered across numerous academic disciplines like science, linguistics, sociology, humanities, and so on. Though its definitions vary a little from discipline to discipline, they all refer to a new thing generated from the collision and interaction of two or more different things. The rising of postcolonial translation theory made the phenomenon of hybrid in translated texts, especially in literary ones the focus of translation studies. In literary translation, the heterogeneity of language, literature and culture in both source and target texts make the translators have to take two linguistic and cultural systems into consideration when translating. Such kind of close-to and deviate-from characteristic is actually the manifestation of hybridity.The late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China is the harvest time for translated novels, which, however, had long been evaluated from the perspective of "domestication" or "foreignization" by scholars. Hybridity transcends the "black-or-white" binary opposition and endows traditional translation theory with new significance. Therefore, examples from translated novels in the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China will be cited in this thesis to explore the phenomenon of hybrid in detail and arrive at distinct conclusions. Though translators in this period often reorganized the source texts or tried to domesticate some contents for specific purposes, they also retained some heterogonous elements in source texts when translating. Old and new elements organically hybridized in translated texts, which made it different from both source texts and existing literary forms in target culture. Whether on linguistic, literary and cultural level, they all had fundamental changes and revealed hybridity. Moreover, due to the limit of the times and constraints of objective conditions, the trend of heterogeneous cultures experienced a process of rejection to recognition from1898to1919, and thus the degree of hybrid in translated texts also showed two different historical periods.