The Interaction Between Lin Shu's Literary Translation Activities And China's Socio-Cultural Context

Lin Shu (1852-1924), a prolific and highly influential translator of western literary works into Chinese, was a monolingual who had to rely heavily on his collaborators in his work of translation. During the last years of his life, he was severely attacked for his conservative political concept, his stubborn defense of classical Chinese against the campaign to promote the use of vernacular Chinese and his mistake-ridden translation. However, his unfaithful translations were still welcomed by the readers then and had tremendous social and cultural impact. This unique translational phenomenon cannot be explained by our traditional translation studies which are preoccupied with the evaluation of the target text based on the source text. In order to give a reasonable explanation of Lin Shu's unique translational phenomenon, the thesis will probe into the interrelationship between China's socio-cultural context then and his practice of translation.My study will begin with the elaboration of the theoretical basis. According to the views of Translation Studies, which is a school of translation emerging in the 1980s represented by Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere, translation is a process which is subject to differing socio-historical conditions. The focus of translation studies should be on the socio-literary norms that govern the target culture and directly influence the process of translation. These views will be adopted to guide the research. To be specific, I choose three elements: ideology, patronage and poetics raised by Lefevere to do further analysis.Next is a study of China's socio-cultural context. In the paper, ideology will be analyzed from two aspects: political ideology and cultural ideology. Moreover, ideology is not something isolated, but a combination of the collective, the translator's, the patron's and the readers' as a whole. These factors influence eachother and decide the final form of the translated works. In the part of patronage, the question discussed is who encouraged the translation of novels and how they influenced Lin Shu's translation. I will dig into the writings of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao to find out the justification they made for encouraging translations of western literary works. As to the poetics, it involves two factors. One is the literary norms like modes of narration, literary genres, subject matters etc. The other is the social views on the role of literature. That is what effects literature will bring forth or should bring forth to the society.The fourth chapter is about the impact of China's socio-cultural context on Lin Shu's translation activities. This is a key part of the thesis. The analysis of Lin Shu's translation activities will be concentrated on three elementary aspects. First his aims of translation will be considered because this factor, to a certain extent, influenced his choice of the originals and his techniques of translation as well. In that special background, his aims of saving and developing China as well as classical Chinese by way of translation was under the influence of his own political and cultural ideologies and the collective political and patrons' ideologies. Second is the analysis of his choice of the original works. His large numbers of translations of Haggard's and Conan Doyle's works were the result of a combined force -the readers' cultural ideology and the poetics. Also his choice of Uncle Tom's Cabin had some connection with his own as well as collective political ideologies. From his preference to Dickens' social novels, we can find the influence of the collective and his own cultural ideologies. As to his techniques of translation, the use of abridging and addition was largely due to the poetics of Chinese culture and the readers' cultural ideology. Some examples like his translations of Uncle Tom's Cabin, David Copperfield and Joan Haste will be analyzed to find the deeper cause of his use of these techniques.The fifth chapter covers the impact of Lin Shu's translations on China's socio-cultural context, which is...