The Influence Of Translation Situation On Translation Strategy

The debate about the "roper2 strategy a translator should adopt has lasted for centuries, both in China and in the West. Actually, the focus of the debate is to find a strategy that achieves the closest translation to the source text, and such a principle is also used in traditional translation criticism to make evaluation of a translation. However, in recent years more and more scholars reach to the agreement that translation activity is a cross-cultural communication which does not merely involve the texts but takes place in specific translation situations. A translator抯 decision of strategy thus will be influenced by the socio-cultural factors in the translation situation. In this sense, a translator has various strategies to choose in translation while aithfulness?is only one of them. In this thesis, I would like to show that different translation situations may lead to different translation strategies by comparison of two English translations of ((~I Most of the preceding comparison between the two translations of ((~I~~? by Hawkes and the Yangs focus on which translation is more correct or whose choice of words is more appropriate. What is new in my thesis is that my purpose is not to make evaluation of the two versions but to explore the possible causes of the different strategies from the perspective of translation situation, which includes a number of factors like ideology, the status of the source text, etc. The recognition of the influence of translation situation is of great significance for the development of translation criticism. aithfulness?will be no longer the single criterion for evaluating translations. Whether the strategy of a translator is appropriate or not lies in whether he reaches some balance between the source culture and the target culture by such a strategy. Chapter one reviews the history of the debate over translation strategy, pointing out the drawbacks of the traditional theories and introducing the new orientation of translation research. Chapter two introduces some scholars?studies on translation activity from the socio-cultural point of view and discusses the influence of some important factors in translation situation like ideology, status of source text, translator抯 perspective, etc. Chapter three compares two strategies in rendering metaphors, illusions and puns appearing in ((~I~~Y~ and displays the different characteristics of the two strategies. Chapter four reveals that the strategies determined by Hawkes and the Yangs are greatly influenced by the different translation situations. In the conclusion, the influence of translation situation on a translator strategy is emphasized and its significance to translation criticism is also illuminated.