| Su Manshu, a legendary literary figure in modern China, is famous for his poems, novels and paintings. In fact, he was an outstanding translator as well. He was active in literary world in about ten years around the 1911 Revolution. His romantic temperament, his wandering life experience, his eccentric behavior, and his charming literary works all have attracted a large number of readers of his time and of the subsequent generation. In the 1920s and 1930s, there appeared a "Su Manshu Craze" in China.As a talented person, Su Manshu had a good command of several foreign languages, such as Japanese, English, French and Sanskrit. His translation contributed much to the development of modern society in China. According to Liu Wu-chi, the study on Su Manshu has undergone three stages since his death. However, their research focus is mainly on his literary creation, including his creation of novels and poems. In terms of his translation, there has been only a brief introduction of the types and the number of his translated works, accompanied by some subjective evaluation. The few papers dealing with his translation are mostly introductive in content and subjective in assessment, with no deep and systematic study on his translation views, strategies, and the great contribution of his translation to modern society. To fulfill this gap, this paper intends to make a systematic study on this great translator, discussing his translation activities and translation views, and offering an objective evaluation of his place in modern Chinese translation history.In order to make an objective study on Su's translation, this thesis adopts a descriptive method initiated by Gideon Toury, a scholar from Tel Aviv School. Descriptive studies is product-oriented, function-oriented and process-oriented. It views translation product as an established fact, tries to trace back the social and historical factors influencing translation activities, and evaluates the function andstatus of translation in the target literary system. Descriptive studies places translation activities and translation products in certain historical and cultural backgrounds. So, this methodology can be used in the study of literary translation, which takes place in certain social and historical situations.The whole thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One introduces translator studies in China, the three stages of studies on Su Manshu, and the methodology to be employed in this paper-descriptive translation studies.Chapter Two is a brief introduction of Su Manshu's life experience and his literary career, including both his literary creation and translation activities.Chapter Three, the most important part of this paper, comprises three parts. The first part makes a descriptive study on Su's translation of political novels and romantic poems, studying the characteristics of his choice of source texts, his purpose of translation, and his strategies in translation. Main factors influencing his choice of source texts are analyzed, which include the social situation, his personal experience and temperamental factors. The second part analyzes Su's views on translation, including his principles of translation, his views on poetry translation, and his views on other aspects of translation. The third part evaluates Su's translation by taking into account the specific historical and cultural background, analyzing its social and literary contribution, and discussing its limitation as well.Chapter Four provides a case study on Su's translation of Byron's poem The Isles of Greece. It examines the strategies Su adopted and the principle he followed in rendering this poem into Chinese, and evaluates his gains and losses in this practice. To make the analysis more convincing, the paper deliberately makes a comparison between his version and another favorably-received Chinese version of this poem.Chapter Five is the conclusion of this thesis. It summarizes the whole paper, concluding that Su Manshu is not only an important historical figure in t...
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