Lin Shu's Chinese Translation Of Joan Haste: Ideologically Restrained Rhetorical Reconstruction

Translation is a process of rhetorical reconstruction of the source text in a different socio-cultural context, in which ideologies clash, negotiate and merge. Translation as rhetorical behaviour is constrained by ideology in that the translated text is both ideologically constituted and constituting. The Chinese translation of H. R.Haggard's Joan Haste by Lin Shu and Wei Yi in the Late Qing Period demonstrates clashes of western and Chinese ideologies in a time of social transition, as fierce debates erupted over their rendition of the moral issues of the source text.This dissertation holds the view that translation is rhetorical reconstruction of the source text constrained by ideology and approaches the translated text from the perspective of rhetoric in its broad sense. By relocating Lin Shu and Wei Yi's rendition of Joan Haste into the social and political reality of the Late Qing Dynasty, this dissertation closely examines the rhetorical manipulation of Lin's translation against the English source text from the three different perspectives of "rhetorical refraining", "textual reconstruction" and "text world values reconstruction", and probes deep into the text world of the target text in the following aspects:how rhetorical devices are employed to rebuild the cultural identities of the characters, how moral discourse in the narrative are naturalized to the social context and the ideology of the receptor culture and how the main character Joan is re-characterized according to the ideological needs of China as it was then. This dissertation expounds these aspects by looking into the ideological motivations behind the rhetorical features of the translated text, the mediation and constraints imposed upon translation by the ideological reality of that time and the great transforming power of translation on social ideology and politics.