A Study Of Gladys Yang’s Translation Of Hu Die From The Perspective Of Field-Habitus Theory

Interdisciplinary studies get an infusion of fresh blood into translation studies.Bourdieu’s sociological concepts and theoretical models applied to translation studies began in the 1990 s,and the theories of field,habitus and capital are widely used to analyze the generation,dissemination and acceptance of translation,and a variety of social constraints in the using of specific strategies and methods.This paper analyzes Gladys Yang’s translation of Hu Die from the perspective of field and habitus.Hu Die is a novella by Wang Meng,who is a famous Chinese novelist,published in 1980.There are many scholars studying it from the perspective of literary studies at home and abroad.This thesis argues that the emergence of a translation is affected by the field of a specific historic period and the translator’s habitus.So taking field and habitus into the discussion of retranslation is a viable option.After the reform and opening up,international exchange between China and the outside world had been strengthened as the Chinese government attached great importance to cultural exchanges with foreign countries.In the 1980 s,Chinese translation activities were mostly organized by the Foreign Language Bureau(FLB),which mainly focused on translating Chinese into foreign languages.Translators had a lot of choices in the relatively loose domestic and international environment.They could choose the text according to their own taste.So Gladys Yang translated some modern and contemporary writers’ works at that time.Gladys,owing to her cross-cultural horizon of Chinese and the West,was unavoidably influenced by her social role.Her flexible use of translation methods and strategies in The Butterfly had helped to meet the foreign readers’ expectations.At the same time,it also analyzes the shortcomings and expectations of this theory applied to the translation analysis.It can be inferred that the theory can also be applied to the study of retranslation of literary works through the analysis of the translation.