Foreign Fiction Translation In Early Modern China:Its Characteristics And Explanations

Foreign fiction translation played a very active and important role in early modern China and helped to shape the literature and ideology of modem China It is surely one of the most noticeable phenomena in Chinese translation history and cross-culture communication history which offers abundant resources for researchers However, it had been in a state of neglect for nearly 7 decades because two main features (popular fiction and free translation) made it fail to adapt to the norm of traditional translation research Thus the traditional translation research saw little value of it, which has been used to focus on the comparison between an original and its translation Such an approach usually neglects the elements of target culture influencing a translator (i e constraints) during his translating process because of which the translator could not transit all the messages of an original to target readers but have to change or delete them This is especially true in a society of the early age of communication like early modem China In fact, most target readers equal a translation to it's original but will not care too much about the differences between them Anyway it is a translation that functions in target readers and target culture, which is actually a rewriting text of an original Therefore why not do translation research from a new angle of analyzing the cultural manipulation revealed in a translation through changes to its' original That is also the starting point of this thesisThere are five chapters in this thesis In Chapter 1 the author briefly describes the phenomenon and it's research situation, introduces the contemporary direction of modern translation research and the theories applied in the analysis namely, polysystem, rewriting and manipulation In Chapter 2 a suitable time division of Jindai or early modem age is given, i e from 1870s to around 1917 In Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 the author respectively describes and analyzes four characteristics of the phenomenon, namely, the boom, its vocative function (i e political propagation and entertainment), popularity of free translation and superiority of wenyan over baihua Besides a probe into the background of this translation phenomenon is also given in Chapter 4 The last chapter, Chapter 5 includes an conclusion of the whole thesis and a repetition of the opinion of writing this thesis...