Yan Fu And Lin Shu's Translation: A Perspective Of Manipulation

China's modern period spans from the Opium War in 1840 to the May Fourth Movement in 1919. To the vast majority of the Chinese people, it was a disastrous period when China suffered greatly both from internal rebellions and external aggressions. Of course, just in this period, many Chinese elites tried their best to find ways to save the country and the people, and one of the important ways was to learn from the west, to be more specific, introducing Western knowledge to China to cultivate people's minds by means of translation.As far as the translation of Western knowledge is concerned, two great translators stand on the front: Yan Fu and Lin Shu. Up till now, researches on translations of Yan and Lin have been done to some degree, but mainly in a traditional source-text oriented way, so many of the findings need improving. As we note, in 1990, Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere, two representatives of Translation Studies School, suggested that translation studies take the "cultural turn". This school mainly explores the socio-cultural backgrounds of translations and the influence of translations on the target culture and literary norms. In the book Constructing Culture they present the view that the study of translation is the study of cultural interaction, which greatly challenges research models of traditional translation study. The theory also sheds a new light on the assessment of Yan Fu and Lin Shu's translation. This thesis intends to analyze the two great translators of Modern China from this brand new perspective by using Andre Lefevere's theory of the manipulation of...