Cultural Position And Literary Translation--A Case Study Of Fiction Translation In The Third Translation Climax In Chinese History

Since the late 1970s, translation studies have moved from the translation as text to translation as culture and politics. Translation has been viewed from a new perspective-social, cultural and historical.According to the hypothesis proposed by Even-Zohar, the translators in a strong literary polysystem tend to apply domesticating strategy and thus produce translations characterized by superficial fluency, while in a weak culture foreignizing strategy or resistant translation prevails.However, in the third translation climax in Chinese history, from the Opium War (1840-1842) well into the '1920s and 30s', things proved to be very complicated. During both of the two phases, China was suffering foreign invasions, the cultural position of China was endangered, and the social system was instable. As a result, the literary system, as a sub-system of the entire cultural and social system, was also rocky. Translation played an important role in this transformation. The choice of the translated texts and the translating strategies were all affected by the position of the cultural position of China at that time. But interestingly enough, the position of translation and the translating strategies prevailed in these two phases are quite different: domestication was dominant in the late Qing Dynasty, while both of domestication and foreignization prevailed in the 1920s to 1930s.By taking into account the translators' attitudes towards Chinese culture and translated literature in Chinese literary polysystem, this paper argues that individual translators' cultural attitudes play an important part in their selection of translation strategy, and that translators with different cultural attitudes tend to produce translations with different stylistic values. This finding explains why some translators tend to produce fluent translations but others do not.