A View Of Culture Construction From Translating Activities

The paper intends to study the cultural construction from the perspective of translation. The author chooses Late Qing Dynasty as the focus and aims at the relations between translating activities and the rebuilding of literary conceptions in Late Qing Dynasty. Although the rebuilding of literary conceptions couldn't be separated from the political, economical, and cultural reform in Late Qing Dynasty, the author insists that translating activities played the decisive role. Depending on the framework of Ploysystem, the paper firstly analyzes the reasons of the prosperity of translating activities and two conditions for the boom of translated literature in the Late Qing Period. Then, the paper gives a detailed illustration on the process of the constructing of the new structure of knowledge through translation, with the approach of "cultural proliferation" and the approach of "Norm". Moreover, the paper provides an elaborate analysis on how such a new structure of knowledge manifested itself in particularly literary creation, literary critiques, and literary conceptions. Finally, based on a large quantity of facts of the published literary works and critiques at that time, the author concludes that the rebuilding of literary conceptions, namely the enhancement of novel's position, western approaches to literature, pursuit of pure literature and the insistence of vernacular Chinese has forged the new construction of the culture at that time. The study of this paper intends to prove an inevitable role of translation in a target culture construction. The great effort of this author is a trying on the exploration of the dynamic relations between translation and cultural changes and furthermore to draw a greater attention on this issue for a better way out of the globalization of culture.