A Study Of Manipulation In The Japanese Translation Of The Chrysanthemum And The Sword

The object of the study in this thesis is translational manipulation,focusing on the relationship between manipulation strategies and manipulation norms,influencing factors,as well as the effects of manipulation.Based on the views of scholars,translational manipulation can be defined as the process and product of the translators handling of a text in the pre-production,production and post-production stages of translation work to adapt the text to the target audience,which are influenced by external factors such as ideology,poetics and patronage in a specific cultural environment.If there is manipulation in the process and products of translation,the quality of translation will be easily questioned.How can translational manipulation theory balance translation quality and translation purpose? What manipulation strategies can be used to achieve this balance? What are the effects of these manipulation strategies? These are topics that have not been fully discussed so far in the field of translational manipulation theory,and are also the focus of this thesis.In order to explore these issues,based on a rough review of translational manipulation theory,the present study takes manipulation factor theory and translation norm theory as the theoretical basis,takes Aiga Dukāte’s translational manipulation typology as the theoretical framework,establishes an analytical model,and takes the Japanese version of Ruth Benedict’s classic The Chrysanthemum and the Sword as the corpus to analyze the constraints,manipulation types,manipulation strategies,results and influences,adequacy and acceptability.The present study divides the manipulation in the Japanese translation into three types: text-external conscious manipulation,text-internal conscious manipulation,and unconscious manipulation.Text-external conscious manipulation is from the macro perspective,including text selection,structural adjustment,concept introduction,text annotation and other ways.Text-internal conscious manipulation is analyzed from the lexical idiom level and sentence and discourse level from the micro perspective.Specific manipulation strategies include word substitution,additions or omissions,sentence text back translation,paraphrase,annotation,substitution and so on.The analysis shows that translational manipulation is a process in which translators tend to choose between “adequacy” and “acceptability”.The analysis also shows that in translational manipulation,the target readers’ aesthetic requirements and expectations are important components of the external factors,and form a relationship of mutual construction with ideology,poetics and patronage,which jointly affects translational manipulation.Generally,translational manipulation is greatly influenced by ideology,poetics,patronage,the target readers’ aesthetic requirements and expectations.These four forces can form a joint force relationship.However,translation quality and social effect must follow the basic rules to find the most appropriate balance between adequacy and acceptability.