The Dialogue Between Postcolonialism And Feminism In The Field Of Translation

Traditionally, translation is regarded as the transfer process between languages, thus making it possible to treat translation as the representation of intelligence and comprehension and to make translation bear subjectivism and mysticism. And the 70s of the 20th century witnessed emergence of scientificism translation predicated on the structuralism linguistics, though a set of systematic theories are formed, such as "the three basic principles" by Tytler and "functional equivalence" by Nida and etc, yet all of these theories are only directed towards the text-to-text equivalence and the transfer of meaning between two texts. However, the school of culture with Bassnett and Lefevere as its representatives underscored the constraints of culture upon translation activity, pointing out that translation does not happen in a vacuum and has to be influenced by such outer factors as power relations, patronage, ideology and poetics, and then Bassnett called this shift of emphasis "the cultural turn" in translation studies.In order to better expound "the cultural turn" and to stress these constraints of culture upon translation, this thesis will make a comparative study between postcolonialism and feminism in the field of translation because the two thoughts are typical tendency of "the cultural turn " and have many affinities: (1) they belong to poststructuralism thought and postmodernism theory; (2) they are ideological movements of dissolving the center for striving for more rights for the marginalists; (3) both of them make an enormous contribution to translation studies. As the author's ability is very limited, this thesis will attempt to make a comparative study between postcolonialism and feminism only from three angles, namely, subjectivity, power relations and cultural identity.First of all, the thesis will review the background of "cultural turn" of translation studies...