On The Representation Of The Image Of China In The Chinese Version Chun Yue Of Spring Moon

Spring Moon, the masterpiece of Bette Bao Lord, is also her earliest novel which has been introduced to China. Its Chinese version was translated by Wu Shiliang, a Chinese performing artist and translator and was proofread by her husband Ying Ruocheng, also a well-known performing artist, translator and stage director. Wu Shiliang has been an English tutor and translator for Premier Zhou Enlai, and the secretary of the great dramatist Cao Yu because of her excellence in English. She has translated another book, the Gloves of Chanlenge by Norwegian dramatist Bjrnstjerne Bjrnson, a Nobel Literature Prize Winner in 1903. Spring Moon tells a story about how the three generations of the big clan of Zhang survived from all the hardships in the late 19th century to the 1980s. Based on the true history of China, a number of history events were involved in this novel, like the Reform Movement in 1898 led by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, the Boxer Movement, the Civil War between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communist Party, the Great Cultural Revolution and so on; moreover, there are plenty of depictions on the image of China which were udergoing significant historical revolutions—political and social upheavals of modernizing China. People have done a number of researches on Bette Bao Lord's Spring Moon from various perspectives, but researches on its translation are just quite a few. And most of them just concern about its language, theme or artistic writing methods. In view of this situation, this thesis will apply imagology of comparative literature and the rewriting translation theory to comb and study the changed and redressed images of China in the Chinese version Chun Yue of Spring Moon, trying to disclose the impact that the dominant Chinese culture exerted on translating process and to do a further dicussion on the issue of constructing national culture identity. It attempts to elucidate the variations, transformations and redresses of the original images of China which are influenced and assimilated by the western culture in Chinese context via the elaboration on the weakened image of ignorance anf backwardness, the strengthened image of Chinese ideology and the demystified image of China by means of comparative study of the original text and the translated text. Consequently, a fact will be unfolded that the translator is obviously dominated by the traditional native Chinese ideology and the poetics of her time, and her attitude towards translation is reader-oriented. Thus, the image of a backward and disordered China is changed and redressed, and a positive image of China is constructed through her rewriting.Generally speaking, this thesis disclosed the fact that the image of China made by American-Chinese is an indistinct, distorted and commanding misunderstanding and imagination. At the meanwhile, it is a practice to apply imagology to the translation study which will provide a new horizon for culture studies on the relation between translation and modern American literature especially the American-Chinese literture.