A Comparative Study On The Two English Translations Of Fu Sheng Liu Ji From The Perspective Of Bourdieu’s Sociological Theory

Fu Sheng Liu Ji was written by Shen Fu,a great literati in the late Qing Dynasty.This work can be regarded as the first true autobiography in China.Since it was first published in 1878,it has been popular at home and abroad for over 140 years with more than 200 different versions.The study on the English translations of Fu Sheng Liu Ji has obtained many significant achievements at home and abroad,a large number of which,however,are about Lin Yutang’s English version.Relatively less attention has been paid to the other two translations,that is,Six Records of a Floating Life by Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-Hui in 1983 and Six Records of a Life Adrift by Graham Sanders in 2011 which is the latest translation of Fu Sheng Liu Ji now.Pierre Bourdieu is a famous sociologist in Contemporary France.Since the 1990 s,with the “cultural turn” and the development of “descriptive translation studies”,social translatology has moved from the previous edge to the center.Bourdieu’s sociological theory has gradually been widely applied in translation studies to explore the reasons for translation texts’ formation and to reveal the social attributes of translation performance.This thesis selects Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-Hui ’s Six Records of a Floating Life and Graham Sanders’ s Six Records of a Life Adrift as the research object to conduct a comparative analysis from the perspective of Bourdieu’s sociological theory,aiming at analyzing the influences on translation practices of these two versions under the differences on field,habitus and capital and discussing translation motivations and translation strategies employed in these two versions.The research shows that in terms of translation motivation,Leonard Pratt chooses to translate the text out of the needs of the times and cultural communication,and Sanders chooses to translate the text more out of his personal literary interest and academic research.In terms of translation strategies,Leonard Pratt tends to translation strategies of domestication,focusing on free translation,omission translation,and other translation methods,adapting to the target language and the target language readers.Nevertheless,Sanders tends to translation strategies of foreignization,mainly literal translation,amplification translation and other translation methods,and pays attention to more detailed and sufficient footnotes.Besides that,Sanders tends to use more colloquial English words to translate the original text,following the source language and retaining an exotic atmosphere for the target readers.