Translation As Rewriting: A Study On Timothy Richard's Translation Of Looking Backward, 2000-1887

In late Qing period(1840-1912), a great amount of western learning was input into China, in which the western missionaries played an undeniable role, and Timothy Richard was one of these famous missionaries. He brought into China the western religious culture as well as the advanced science and technology through translation, and some of his translations had a profound impact on China. Being a missionary, politician and translator, Timothy Richard relieved the people in disaster; made friends with influential Chinese officials and translated western books, including Looking Backward, 2000-1887. The novel, written by the 19th American novelist Edward Bellamy (1850-1898), depicts in a fictional way that the social system of capitalism perishes in the United States in 2000, and is replaced by the socialist ideology and its corresponding social system instead. In 1888, the book was published in America , and it was translated into Chinese by Timothy Richard only two years later and serialized with the title Hui Tou Kan Ji Lue(回头看纪略) on Wan Guo Gong Bao(万国公报), the publication of Guang Xue Hui(广学会). In 1894, entitled as Bai Nian Yi Jiao(百年一觉),the translation of Looking Backward, 2000-1887 was offprinted and published by Guang Xue Hui. As a rare translated secular literary works of Timothy Richard, Bai Nian Yi Jiao is self-evident valuable for translation studies.Traditional literary translation is imposed with great social and cultural function. It bears the responsibility to propagate a certain ideology, especially in a given historical context. AndréLefevere, one of the leading persons of the"Cultural School", claims that translation is rewriting, and all rewritings, whatever their intention, reflect a certain ideology and a poetics. This thesis takes Bai Nian Yi Jiao, a novel translated by Timothy Richard, as the object of study. On the basis of a systematic literature review of the theory of rewriting, the author intends to put this translation into a macro social and cultural background, to analyze the translation features and strategies manifested in Timothy Richard's Bai Nian Yi Jiao such as deletion, addition and alteration. Further explorations are made on Timothy Richard's choice of text to be translated and the causes of rewritings in his translation by analyzing the ideology and poetics in late Qing period. In this way, this paper demonstrates the tension between the Chinese culture and that of the West in a particular historical period determines Timothy Richard's employment of translation strategies, and leads to his manipulating and rewriting the original text on various levels.