What Makes The Difference: Uncle Tom's Cabin Revisited

Based on the theories from the Manipulation school and adopting the descriptive and systemic approach to the study of translation, the thesis aims at exploring the correlations between translators' decision-making in fiction translation and the social-cultural contexts in which translations are produced.To give a substantial representation of my analysis, case studies will be done on two Chinese translations of Uncle Tom's Cabin. I will specify the time-bound nominative conditions relating to literary translation through reconstructing the contexts where the two translations are produced and identify actual strategies adopted by the translators by examining the translated texts. Instead of dealing with local, linguistic issues in the translations and thus making judgement as one version is better than the other, the major concern of this study is to provide certain explanations to such questions as why this novel was chosen (not) to be (re)translated and why it was first translated in this way and later in another.Based on the evidence found, I will then argue that the act of translating is usually constrained by certain socio-cultural forces and prevailing norms in the overall environment and translators tend to produce rewritings, echoing the requirements of the current ideology and other historical nominative conditions.