A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Wuthering Heights In Light Of The Rewriting Theory

With the development of translation studies,more and more researchers realized that translation should not be studied only at the linguistic level.Scholars have expanded the scope of translation studies by introducing society,history,culture and other extra-linguistic factors.André Lefevere's rewriting theory,a representative achievement in the period,declares that translation is rewriting,which is manipulated by the three constraints of ideology,poetics and patronage in different historical contexts.Wuthering Heights,a representative work of Emily Bront?,a British writer of the 19 th century,has been very popular in China.Among the various Chinese versions of this English fiction,the version by Yang Yi in 1955 and the one by Fang Ping in 1986 are the most influential and complete two versions.These two renditions reflect completely different historical backgrounds and styles of their translators.This thesis seeks to make a comparative research between Yang Yi's and Fang Ping's translated versions and analyze the influence of ideology,poetics and patronage in actual translation practice based on André Lefevere's rewriting theory.Through comparison,we discover that the purposes of translation are influenced by the ideologies in different historical background to a great extent;and affected by the dominant poetics,the translators tend to choose words and phrases seriously to cater for different target readers;In addition,the subjectivity of the translator is also influenced by the patronage.Generally speaking,Yang Yi's translation is rather faithful to the original and she adopts the strategy of foreignization;while Fang Ping rewrote and changed the original text to a certain extent.