A Study Of Li Wenjun’s Translation Of The Sound And The Fury From The Perspective Of Manipulation Theory

The Sound and the Fury is one of the representative works of the famous American novelist William Faulkner,and it is also a classic of the stream-of-consciousness literature.It stands out in numerous literary works for its innovative writing techniques.It arouses wide concern all over the world and has been translated into many languages.Li Wenjun,the famous scholar who is an expert on the study of William Faulkner,is the first one to translate The Sound and the Fury into Chinese.His translation of the novel has won extensive complements from all over the country since it was published in 1984 and has made a contribution to the development of Chinese literature.Thus,Li Wenjun’s translated version of The Sound and the Fury has great significance of study.Translation studies paradigm has gone through tremendous changes since 1970 s,from pure language study to multi-level cultural studies,and thus comes the cultural turn of translation studies.Manipulation school,represented by André Lefevere,thinks that translation is a kind of manipulation to serve some sort of purpose to some degree.Lefevere combines the factors of ideology,poetics and patronage to translation studies.In his opinion,the process of literary translation is influenced not only by the intro-textual factors,but also by the outer-textual factors of ideology,poetics and patronage.Thus is to say,the translator’s translation is unavoidably restricted by the social and cultural factors.This thesis makes a study of Li Wenjun’s translation of The Sound and the Fury under manipulation theory.The study takes the qualitative methodology,putting the translator Li Wenjun and his translation under the specific historical and cultural conditions,the period when China has just implemented the reform and opening-up policy in the early 1980 s.Through the analysis of the ideology,poetics and patronage in the early 1980 s,the study hopes to find out how the three factors influence Li Wenjun’s translation of the novel.By detailed textual analysis,this thesis concludes that Li Wenjun’s translation is influenced by the ideology,poetics and patronage at that time,reproducing the original work’s feature to the utmost on lexical level,syntactic level and textual level.This research verifies the applicability of manipulation theory to literary translation under certain historical period.