A Contrastive Analysis Of China’s Images In The Opium War And Its Chinese Translation From The Perspective Of Imagology

Imagology originated from comparative literature and focuses on the issue of the image of the other in foreign literary works.As a socio-cultural representation,the image of a nation or country is not innate,but gradually formed in the process of social production and communication,and is linked to the identity and identity of a specific group,so the nature of image or identity construction is the core of image studies.Modern imagology is concerned with how the image of the other contributes to the construction and change of one’s own national cultural identity and image,and for translation studies,it is also concerned with how the image of the other acts on the formation of one’s own national image and identity through the production and dissemination of translation.Translation is an important means and way of shaping the image of the other,and reconstructing the process of shaping the image of the other through translation helps to reveal the various regulatory factors in the process of translation production and dissemination.This thesis analyzes The Opium War and its Chinese translation from the perspective of imagology,according to the imagological analysis method,from internal and external of the text.The internal textual analysis consists of three levels: lexicon,hierarchical relationships,and plot,while the external analysis starts from the imaginaire social of the author and analyzes the reasons why the original text presents a strong ideological image of China,and then analyzes the reasons why the translator reconstructs the image of China in the Chinese translation from three aspects: the translator’s sources of information,his emotional attitude,and his historical writing style.The study finds that the translator’s image of the “other” in the eyes of foreigners,i.e.,the special “self” image,has changed in three aspects,namely,lexicon,hierarchical relations and plot: The translator removed adjectives or adverbs used in the original text,changed the corresponding hierarchical relationships of characters,and modified some plots of the story.The reasons for the translator’s reconstruction of the “self” image are analyzed from the following three aspects.First of all,the translator’s sources of information.As a historian,the translator checked the Chinese historical sources quoted by the author and found that the author had problems in understanding some Chinese sources.Furthermore,the translator’s emotional attitude also prompted the translator to reconstruct the image of China,and there are some descriptions in the original text that may hurt the feelings of Chinese readers.Finally,because the book is a historical work,the translator and the author have different ways of writing history,which also leads the translator to reorganize the language,which also leads to the difference between the image of China in the Chinese translation and the image in the original text.The essence of image is discourse,a way of expression,and the translator uses translation as bridge and means to create a different image of China in the Chinese translation from the original,that is,a weakened ideological image of China.