A Comparative Study On Brother Zhou’s Translation Activities

Translation studies have been undergoing a remarkable turn----the cultural turn,establishing an interactive and interlapping relationship with cultural studies. It unfetteredthe translation studies from words and texts analysis and changed the view of translationas an sheer conversion exchanges of symbols of two languages.Translation studies havebeen transformed from the prescriptive studies concerning languages to descriptive studiesin terms of cultures. With the cultural turn, the translation studies have been placed in abroader perspective of history and culture, trying to describe and explain the interactiverelationship between the translation activities and the society culture.Lu Xun and Zhouzuo----the Brother Zhou are the two shining stars in Chinesemodern literary world. They both are the pioneers of the New Culture Movement butmaking their debut as translators in the first beginning. Working together, they ushered ina new era in Chinese translation field and making significant contribution to thedevelopment of Chinese translation and literary development. However, with a lot ofsimilarities with regards to growing-up environment and living conditions, they led tototally different roads both in translation and their lives. These also provide us as a greatstudy case to analysis the impacts from society and culture on translators in undertakingtranslation activities as well as to explain why different translator choose different ways oftranslating even under the similar social and historical conditions.In this dissertation, the author took the culture as the longitude, translation latitude todiscover the cultural and historical factors that impact translation motivations,choices oftranslation texts, translation philosophies and strategies of the Brother Zhou in the specificsocial conditions.This dissertation can be divided into six chapters. In the first chapter, starting fromcultural turn, the authored built up the foundation of this paper under the framework ofItamar Even-Zohar’s Polysystem Theory and Andre Lefevere’s Manipulation Theory.Beginning from Chapter Two, it is a chronical description of Brother Zhou’stranslation career. Centering on the translated works, the authored tried to explore thereasons and describe the conditions under which they carried out the similar and different translation work in the different period of time. It includes the novels and literary canonsthey translated together, their respective views in the same literary field---fairy taleliterature, the impacts on their translation views and life from Japanese literature and theirown fruitful field----the Soviet Russia literature and ancient Greek classics.Chapter five is a comparative study of Brother Zhou’s translation philosophy. It canbe divided into two parts. Firstly, it deducted the evolution of Brother Zhou’s translationthinkings and pointed out the impacts from the foreign classics at different period of time.Secondly, it compared and explained the most discussed topic of Brother Zhou’stranslation style----the literal translation strategy.Chapter Six concludes this dissertation by pointing out two major findings. The firstone is, it is proved that the translation activity is under the manipulation of multiplefactors from the culture and the society, of which the culture statues of the target languageis playing the most crucial role. The second is, by analyzing and comparing the translationof Brother Zhou’s translation activities, we can easily notice the limits of the presenttheories of translation studies----the blind spot in analyzing the different translation stylesof different translators who live in the similiar social and cultural background. The authorholds the opinion that the personal literary thinkings and translation philosophy of thetranslators is the casting the decisive effects in translation activities, thus the subjectiveinitiative of the translator should always be included when conducting the analysis and thedescription of a translation activity.