On "Creative Treason" In Literary Translation: From The Perspective Of Cultural Studies

Translation theory has traditionally stressed the establishment of translation criteria and traditional studies have thus focused mainly on the comparison of source and target texts, taking "fidelity" as the highest criterion. Whether the principle of "faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance" of Yan Fu or the dynamic and functional equivalence of Eugene Nida, it can be seen that traditional view of translation highlights the source text and the author, and it is a source-oriented, prescriptive approach aimed for guiding translation practices.However, in the history of literary translation both in China and in the West "unfaithful" or treasonous translations did take place all the time. Moreover, it can be seen that not all translation practices are aimed for faithfulness. Even translators who advocated "faithfulness" in the theoretical discussions of translation have produced unfaithful translations in their practice. Traditional translation theory finds itself fruitless in explaining the existence of these "treasonous translations", thus they are criticized as wild or wrong translations.Inspired by cultural studies that came into being in the 1960s, translation studies has begun to take its "cultural turn" by the end of the 1970s. The "cultural turn" of translation studies signifies that translation studies have broken through traditional linguistic and aesthetic paradigms and gained a new dimension and perspective. Translation studies have become the introspection of cultures to some extent. Cultural studies approach to literary translation is a descriptive research, which means that the focus of this kind of study is not on the comparison of source and target texts or thecompliance of translated texts with translation criteria, but on the historical and socio-cultural contexts in which specific translated texts come into being. And then through the analysis of the roles these translated texts have played in the target culture, the difference and collision between source and target cultures and the kind of distortion in the process of literary translation can be revealed.Enlightened by these cultural studies approaches to literary translation, and borrowing the concept of "creative treason" from comparative literature, the author tries to illustrate reasons of the occurrence of various kinds of creative treason and their cultural significance. Creative treason in the translated text in this paper refers to the objective deviation of the translated text from the source text by literary translators' manipulation of the latter, consciously or unconsciously, actively or passively. The main forms of creative treason in literary translation, such as addition, omission and paraphrase, will be given more priority than any other forms in this thesis. There are many factors that contribute to the occurrence of creative treason in the translated text, such as untranslatability of languages, translator's carelessness and technical misconduct and etc, but these kinds of roots will not be covered in this thesis because of the limited space. The roots of different kinds of creative treason in literary translation will be analyzed from the following two aspects, first in terms of the translator, such as literary translator's subjectivity, translator's literary and aesthetic orientation, translation purpose or the consideration for target text readers; second in terms of target cultural interference, such as ideological or socio-cultural manipulation, the interference of literary tradition and aesthetic tastes of the target culture,patronage's interference.The study of creative treason in literary translation has profound cultural significance: firstly, the study of creative treason from the perspective of cultural studies can not only reveal the difference and collision between source and target cultures in the process of cultural communication but also the misunderstanding between them; secondly, through the cultural interpretation of creative treason, the socio-cultural contexts in which translated texts are made, s...