Manipulation And Resistance To Manipulation:A Study Of Yan Fu's Chinese Translation Of A Short History Of Politics

With the development of translation studies,the research focus gradually extends from the internal study of language to the external study of language.In recent years,the "cultural turn" has placed the translation studies in a larger social and cultural context.As a representative of the Manipulation School,Andre Lefevere put forward the Manipulation Theory in his work Translation,Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame in 1992.Lefevere maintained that translation is mainly influenced by three main factors,that is,ideology,poetics and patronage.The Manipulation Theory emphasizes the influences of the historical,cultural and political factors on translation in the target society.The translations in the late Qing Dynasty are often considered by some scholars as "unfaithful" because the translators always added or deleted the contents.However,such translations had made a profound impact on the politics and culture in the society at that time.Yan Fu's Chinese translation of A Short History of Politics,Shehui Tongquan,is such an example.Yan Fu(1854-1921)was a great translator in modern China and his translations were epoch-making in the Chinese translation history.Yan Fu translated many Western works of social sciences and was a pioneer in systematically introducing the Western learning to China.Compared to Yan Fu's other translated works,there are few systematic studies of Yan Fu's Chinese translation of A Short History of Politics.Besides additions,deletions and cultural adaptions,Yan Fu also added many annotations in Shehui Tongquan to express his own political ideas in order to eventually fulfil his political aims.This may seem unreasonable according to the traditional translation standard of "faithfulness" and"equivalence",but Andre Lefevere's Manipulation Theory can provide a new insight to explain this.With Andre Lefevere's Manipulation Theory as the theoretical framework,the dissertation intends to study Yan Fu's Chinese translation of A Short History of Politics.Through documentary analysis,this dissertation probes into the manipulative factors such as ideology,poetics and patronage that influence Yan Fu's translation motivations,Yan Fu's choice of the source text,the translation strategies and the target readers under the historical,political and cultural contexts.Another method used in this study is the descriptive method.It is more appropriate to adopt the descriptive method to evaluate Yan Fu's Chinese translation of A Short History of Politics and investigate the reception of this work in a more objective way.Through detailed analysis it can be seen that Yan Fu's Chinese translation of A Short History of Politics has reflected the manipulation of all the three factors,that is,ideology,poetics and patronage concerning Yan Fu's translation activity.The ideology influences Yan Fu's translation process including his translation motivations,his choice of the source text,his translation strategy and methods,his target readers and so on.Poetics mainly influences the language features of Shehui Tongquan from three aspects,that is,the language style,the syntactical features and the lexical features.In terms of patrons,Guo Songtao influenced Yan Fu mainly from the ideological respect.After exchanges with Guo Songtao several times during his studying abroad,Yan Fu was encouraged to study the politics and culture of the Western society,and was therefore exposed to the works of many Western thinkers.As a patron,Wu Rulun helped to elevate Yan Fu's status in the literary circle,so he influenced Yan Fu from the status respect.But he was a professional of the literary circle at the same time,so he also influenced Yan Fu poetically.Zhang Yuanji and Yan Fu had similar ideology and they both hoped to save the country through translating the Western learning,so Zhang Yuanji influenced Yan Fu from the ideological respect.Moreover,Zhang Yuanji paid Yan Fu high royalties for his translations,so he also influenced Yan Fu economically.The Commercial Press not only influenced Yan Fu economically and ideologically,but also helped him to elevate the social status and become an eminent translator.As a translator,Yan Fu could exert his subjectivity to resist the manipulation of ideology and poetics to a certain degree.In the aspect of ideology,Yan Fu was did not agree with the idea of "Chinese learning as the base,Western learning for application" put forward by the Westernization Group.Yan Fu strongly opposed the radical thought of the exclusion of the foreigners and the Manchu.In the aspect of poetics,Yan Fu sometimes used the pre-Qin syntax that deviated from the language features of the Tongcheng School.Besides,Yan Fu often added a number of notes and commentaries in his translations to renovate the poetics of the traditional Chinese translation.In the meantime,Shehui Tongquan had also made certain impacts on ideology and poetics in the Chinese society.The political thoughts presented in this work produced political disputes between different parties,refreshed the Chinese people's mind and influenced the social ideology.The language expressions coined by Yan Fu in this work were gradually integrated into the Chinese culture and became part of it.So Shehui Tongquan influenced the poetics in the Chinese society to a certain extent.This dissertation examines Yan Fu's Chinese translation of A Short History of Politics from the perspective of the Manipulation Theory,which transcends the exploration of translation activities on the language level and probes into the manipulative factors that influence the translation activities under the historical,political and cultural contexts.This not only can explain the "unfaithfulness"phenomenon in translation and improve the translation criticism,but also can provide some materials for the compilation of translation history.However,this research still has some insufficiency which needs further efforts.Firstly,many quotations cited in this dissertation were originally written in Chinese.When translating them into English,this dissertation aims to faithfully convey the most important idea of the original,sometimes inevitably at the expense of elegance and grace of the original or even neglecting some less important points.Next,patronage can further or hinder the translation according to Lefevere's theory.This dissertation mainly analyzes the positive impacts of the patronage in the creation and publication of Shehui Tongquan.Due to limitation of the materials,this dissertation does not discuss the negative impacts of the patronage.With continuous development of translation studies,it is hoped that there will be more and more systematic and in-depth researches on this point in the future.