A Study On Sidney Shapiro’s Chinese-English Translation From The Perspective Of Cultural Identity

Throughout the translation history both in China and in the west,the focus of translation studies has been laid on the translation theories and translation methods for quite a long time.And translators have been in the state of invisibility and their status as the subjects of translation has not received due attention.Therefore,studies on translators or translators’ subjectivity are rare.With the advent of “cultural turn” in the western translation field in the 1970 s,translation studies have gradually broken the limitation of linguistics and translation has expanded its scope of research.Translation is no longer a matter of mere linguistic transformation,but a cross-cultural communication activity with multiple cultural factors involved.Consequently,more importance has been attached to the translators’ leading role in translation process,and the number of studies concerning translators has greatly increased.At the same time,postcolonialism suddenly rises which is an important theoretical school of the cultural research field in translation studies.And cultural identity,as the important theory of postcolonialism,has attracted more attention from the researchers.As a result,the exploration of translator’s cultural identity will inevitably provide a new research perspective for studies on both translation and translators,promoting the further development of translation studies.The thesis conducts an in-depth study on Sidney Shapiro against the above theoretical background who is a special translator in the translation history of China.And the paper mainly explores the construction of Sidney Shapiro’s cultural identity and the interaction between his cultural identity and his Chinese-English translation.As is known that Sidney Shapiro is a professional American-Chinese translator.During his translation career of over half a century,Shapiro has introduced dozens of Chinese excellent literary works to the western world and made great contributions to the spread of Chinese culture and the promotion of the cultural communications between China and the west.And his outstanding contributions are closely related to his special cultural identity.It is acknowledged that Sidney Shapiro has a special cultural identity which plays a significant role in every link of his translation process.Hence,his translation intention,selection of the source texts,his translation thoughts and translation strategies adopted all bear the stigma of his cultural identity.On account of this,the thesis tries to dissect his special cultural identity and the construction of his identity and explore the interaction between his cultural identity and each link of his translation,aiming at reexamining Sidney Shapiro’s Chinese-English translation activities from the perspective of cultural identity.