The Manipulation Of Socio-culture In Literary Translation

Literary translation theory has traditionally stressed the establishment of and compliance with translation criteria which focused on the comparison of source and target texts, taking "fidelity "as the highest criterion. Yet, there still leave a few crucial problems to be solved.According to the hypotheses of Lefevere, Zohar and Benjamin, translators, as important participants in the construction of national culture, do not work in abstract situations nor desire to be absolutely objective and they have to face such questions: what to translate, when and how to translate, and for whom the translation serves; how do translators select suitable words and expressions. These views will be adopted to guide the thesis.This thesis focusing particularly on the manifold impact and manipulation of socio-culture in regard to literary translation, illustrates that in what way, to be specific, such factors as ideology, cultural tradition, poetics and ethics constrain literary translation.In the first place, this thesis will begin with the elaboration of the theoretical base, demonstrating the remarks that have been done recently by the literary translation researchers and by drawing enlightenment from them the author gets the hypothesis of this thesis.Living in a particular social background, the translator is manipulated by thesocial power and discourse. In the second part, the author presents some related theoretical data that have been done previously. Most of this part has unifying theme, that is, it takes case studies of leading writers and translators as a basis for the discussion, proposing a number of different translation manipulationsThen this thesis attempts to assess what impact socio-culture exerted upon translator, analyzing in detail why he adopts this translation strategy not that one. In part three, the key part of this thesis, the author demonstrates the ideological, cultural, poetical, and ethical constraints respectively manifested in literary translation, analyzing how literary translation as a social activity is restricted by the macro social elements. The thesis argues that these translation activities can reflect the actual and historical relations between countries in respect of politics, culture, literature, and the exercise of the power of discourse. It aims to comment on the complex and intricate connections between socio-culture and translating activity embedded in cross-cultural thinking and practice, so as to shed new light on how socio-cultural factors can be enhanced or vitiated through translation as a cross-cultural practice.Affected by socio-culture, the translator has to make a decisive choice on the translation of the original literary works. Part four covers the manifold translation strategies: addition, omission, substitution and explicitness.Based on the study above, in the last chapter, conclusion is drawn that there exists extreme interrelationship between the macro socio-cultural factors and theliterary translation. In the process of literary translation, the translator is manipulated by a series of exterior elements and he, consciously or not, must adjust himself to them.