The Study On Translators Of Children's Literature From The Late Qing Dynasty To The May Fourth Period(1898-1927)

As Anthony Pym discussed in his book Methods in Translation History,the central object of historical knowledge should be the human translator,since only humans have the kind of responsibility appropriate to social causation and only through translators and their social entourage can we try to understand why translations were produced in a particular historical time and place.And considering the fact that children' s literature stays out of the literary system for its special readership in the contemporary with cultural pluralism,this study decided to choose the children' s literature translators from the late Qing Dynasty to the May4 th Movement as the research object.This study takes the translators as an occupational group rather than several specific individuals,and the research object mainly includes two types: the missionary translators from West to China and local Chinese translators.Moreover,the researcher operates the study both from the perspective of translation history and social history,based on Polysystem Theory.This study is a descriptive and explanatory research,and operates the multi-cases study as supplementary in order to get a more in-depth exploration.The research procedures are presented as follows: Firstly,the author has prepared and organized two appendices------The Catalogue of Translators and Their Translated Literary Works for Children During 1898-1927 in Appendix ? and The Introduction of Some Translators in Appendix ? in order to get the first-hand research data.Secondly,based on the two appendices,the author draws the general picture of children' s literature translation.Thirdly,the author analyses the emergence of children' s literature translators,in which multi-cases were studied.Finally,the author furtheranalyses the characteristics of translators from the demographic characteristics,source-text selecting and translation strategies.Thus,in such a hybrid approach,this study aims to describe the general picture of children' s literature translators and their works during this period,to provide a preliminary analysis on the emergence of children' s literature translators and to analyze their characteristics systematically.Correspondently,the whole thesis has five parts as follows:Chapter one is an introductory part of the study,in which the research background,significance of the study,theoretical basis,contents and method are introduced.Chapter two is literature review that makes the basic literature preparation from three aspects: studies on translation history,definition of children' s literature and studies on children' s literature translation.Chapter three pictures children' s literature translation from the late Qing Dynasty to the May Fourth period based on the Catalogue of Translators and Their Translated Literary Works for Children During 1898-1927 in Appendix ?.Chapter four analyses the social causation of the emergence of children' s literature translators from three subsystems and operates the case study in order to produce the in-depth recognition.Chapter five analyzes their characteristics systematically from their demographic characteristics,source-text selection and translation strategies.Chapter six carries on conclusion to this paper and points out its limitations.