On Mistranslation In Literary Translation-A Case Study Of The Translation Of Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban From The Perspective Of Context

Translation errors and defects are inevitable owing to the differences between languages and cultures. Nowadays, the issue of mistranslation has aroused a lot of attention in the field of translation studies. In China, most studies on mistranslation are concerned with translation practice. However, as the "cultural turn" became thriving in translation studies since 1980s, horizons on mistranslation have been broadened, and new topics have popped up such as the relationship between mistranslation and context, cognitive and psychological modes, comprehension mechanism, logical thing and culture, the relationship between mistranslation and translators'subjectivity, the influence of mistranslation on cultural communication and so on.Though it has been only ten years since the release of the first book, Harry Potter series has been translated into 65 languages and published in more than two hundred countries by now. The English edition of Harry Potter and the Prisoner ofAzkaban was published in September 1999. In order to seize lion's share of the market, the People's Literature Publishing House published the simplified Chinese version which was translated by Zheng Xumi in October,2000, a year after the original version hit the market. Translated within a limited working schedule, the translated work suffered some criticism from both scholars and readers due to its low translation quality. For the consistency of style (most of the Harry Potter books were translated by Ma Ai-nong) and under pressure of criticism Zheng's version encountered, the People's Literature Publishing House published the revised edition in 2009 translated by Ma Ai-xin and Ma Ai-nong to take place of Zheng's version.Under the framework of context, this thesis, with Ma Ai-xin and Ma Ai-nong's version as comparison, makes a thorough classification of the mistranslations in Zheng's translation. The mistranslations are categorized into three different types according to context classification, that is, linguistic context or co-text, siruational context and cultural context, so as to minimize avoidable mistranslations and seek translation of higher quality.