The Role Of Ideology In The Shaping Of A Literary Translation

The emphasis of translation studies is shifting from linguistic studies to extralinguistic studies, which indicates that translation is far from a practice of bilingual transfer, and many other factors are involved in the process of translation such as culture, history, aesthetic value as well as ideology in the target language context. Andre Lefevere is one of the western scholars, who have been devoted to extralinguistic studies. He puts forward four important constraints under which translators operate. They are poetics, patronage, universe of discourse as well as ideology. The study focuses on the constraint of ideology, and through the case study of Lin Shu's translation of David Copperfield, the study tries to examine its feasibility from the perspectives of politics, ethics and beliefs respectively, which are three important components of ideology. Sufficient examples in Lin Shu's translated text indicate that ideology does play a vital role in influencing his translation strategy during the process of translation. However, Lin Shu's practice is by no means the only case. The study also tries to prove the universality of Lefevere's statement by analyzing the derminatives of ideology in literary translation and concrete examples in many other translations. In the end, it is concluded that the influence of ideology upon the translator is from nowhere but imposed by the patrons, people, publishers and other institutions. The translator seems to be caught into a dilemma: on the one hand, he tries to convince the readers or the professionals in the target language culture that he is by all means, a competent translator, on the other hand he must adhere to the ideology in the receptor culture. When the translator is dealing with the cultural elements in the original works, which are in disharmony with those in the receptor language culture, they would act in agreement with the ideology in the receptor culture. Meanwhile, the implications both theoretical and practical are explored in the thesis. The justification of Andre Lefevere's statement helps to understand the possibility of applying the western translation theories to solving the problems involved in translation from Chinese to foreign languages and vice versa. The justification of Andre Lefevere's statement sheds light on the limitations of the traditional approach to translation criticism. Moreover, the justification of Andre Lefevere's statement well explains the demand of different translated versions of the same original text in different periods.