Cultural Orientation In Yan Fu's Translation

Yan Fu (1854-1921) is one of the most influential translators and translation theorists in China. His translations of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Western intellectual works effected enormous changes in the world view of his contemporaries. His translation principle has been held up as a model by the majority of Chinese translators and in Chinese translation studies ever since. With the development of translation theory his translation practices have invited many criticisms, especially when compared with his own translation principle. Nevertheless, his translation did achieve a great success in the target language community.To account for this phenomenon, the author of this thesis, by adopting a contemporary cultural approach of translation, intends to make a tentative analysis, from the cultural perspective, of the acceptability of Yan Fu's translation principle and his translation of T.H. Huxley's Evolution and Ethics and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. He not only laid emphasis on the target culture and subjectivity of translator in theory but also put his ideas of translation into his own practice, in the hope of meeting the needs of his specific readership in the target-culture situation and fulfilling his idea of saving the Chinese nation. From the perspectiveof cultural manipulation on translation activity, the thesis attempts to give a re-examination and re-evaluation of Yan's translations, arguing that despite the imperfection of his translations, there are rationality and acceptability in his contents as well as language forms.Translation is a cross-cultural communicative event. As the subject of translation activity, the translator should never be a passive follower of the source text, but should choose proper translation strategies within the norms of the target language to realize the function of the target text. As can be observed from our analysis of his translation principle, Yan had already had a deep understanding of this point at the outset of his proposal. In his theory he focused on the "expressiveness" as it could make his translations of the western progressive intellectual works more acceptable to the feudal scholars in the Qing Period.Through the analysis of the case studies of On Evolution ( ) and On the Boundary Limit between the Rights of Society and Individual ( ), the author of this thesis makes a descriptive investigation of Yan's selective intake of the Western political and philosophical works, believing that his translation strategies of addition, deletion and shift of the source text as well as his use of archaic style are to achieve his goal of saving the Chinese nation.