The Interaction Between The Translation Of Chinese Union Version And Chinese Socio-cultural Context

This thesis examines the translation of the Chinese Union Version and Chinesesocio-cultural context. It aims to prove the Chinese Union Version's authoritative role in all ofthe Chinese Versions of Bible, and explore the reasons for its popularity, then furthermore toreveal the interaction between the translation of Chinese Union Version and Chinesesocio-cultural context.This thesis focuses on the Chinese Union Version which was started to translate in 1891and finished in 1919 and its corresponding socio-cultural context, uses the methodology ofGideon Toury's descriptive translation studies;Lefevere's definition on ideology, poetics andpatronage and Even-Zohar's polysytem theory are also discussed in this thesis.Before the translation of Chinese Union Version, Chinese ideology and poetics greatlyinfluenced the translation, which was realized with the help of the patronage-----BibleSociety which set translation principles and translation procedures for the translation ofChinese Union Version. After the Chinese Union Version was published, ideologically, itaccelerated the spread of Christianity, unified the Chinese Bible throughout the country, andbrought new challenges to traditional Chinese cultural ideologies;it also introduced someChristian vocabularies, expressions, literary materials, literary genres and promoted thepopularity of vernacular Chinese. All these belong to the category of poetics. In thesocio-cultural context nowadays, the Chinese Union Version still stands for the authority ofChinese Bible, which could not be replaced by any other version recently. This is determinedby the ideological factors behind it.The conclusion of this thesis is drawn as follows: Chinese Union Version will remain inChina for a longer time due to certain ideological factors. Only when Chinese Poetics changeso much that the Chinese Union Version can not meet the readers' need, could it be replacedby a new version which is both linguistically classic and socio-culturally well-received. Andthe course of replacement itself will take a long time. Based on the illustration above, theauthor concludes that translation should be studied within the framework of socio-culturalcontext, and studies on text-to-text translation are limited and cannot instruct translationeffectively, since translation is not conducted in a vacuum.