Translation As Rewriting

Lin Shu (alias Lin Qinnan, 1852-1924) is a controversial figure in Chinese history of translation. He, though the initiator of modern Chinese literary translation, has been belittled and even dismissed for various reasons over the years in three waves of interest in him and his translations. The target/cultural-oriented Manipulation Theory in translation studies sheds a new light on the evaluation of Lin Shu's translations and the understanding of translation as a whole.The Manipulation Theory, which is indebted to Zohar's Poly-system theory theoretically and to Holmes and Toury's Descriptive Studies methodologically, focuses on analyses of social-cultural factors that influence, manipulate translation, especially literary translation. Adopting cultural studies terminology, Lefevere developed the theory by claiming that translation is a kind of rewriting of the ST manipulated by two concrete factors: the dominant ideology and poetics.In the light of Lefevere's theory, the thesis first examines Lin Shu's remarks about translation made within the social-cultural context of his time. An ideological contradiction between a sense of inferiority and one of superiority is embodied in Lin Shu's choice of the "analogy strategy", which inclines him either to comparing typical devices of Chinese historical prose, highly developed by Sima Qian, with those of Western fictions, or to comparing the Western genre of fiction to the traditional Chinese genre of joke.It is this kind of understanding of the devices and the role of literature that actually manipulates Lin Shu's translating action directly, for a descriptive case study shows that nearly all shifts, both additions and deletions, collected from a comparative reading of one of Lin Shu's masterpieces The Record of Jokes and its original The Sketch Book byWashington Irving, systematically refracts poetic manipulation either from typical devices of the historiographic prose, or the peripheral role of jokes, which belonged to the traditional genre of xiaoshuo(/.hi&).In conclusion, the thesis reiterates the view that manipulation really exists in Lin Shu's translating and translations. Thus Lin Shu's translation is rather a rewriting than a mess of "errors". Meanwhile the thesis points out that the exploration of the strong influences of Chinese poetics in The Record of Jokes may give some evidence and enlightenment for the study of comparative poetics, which in turn, will provide translation studies with a new research scope and methodology.