Translation As A Reflection Of The Manipulation Of Ideology

Translation, in the light of Lefevere's theory, is a rewriting, governed by factors such as ideology, patronage, poetics, etc. among which ideology is one of the most important ones.This thesis attempts to examine the relationship between translation and ideology on the basis of a comparative analysis of two Chinese versions of Gone with the Wind, written by Mitchell, so as to figure out the great influence upon translation exerted by ideology. The cases are mainly taken from two familiar Chinese versions, namely, Fu Donghua's Piao and Chen Liangting's Luanshi Jiaren.Through careful examination of these concrete examples, this study is intended to demonstrate that ideology manipulates the entire translation process, which is divided into preliminary stage and operational stage inspired by Toury. The preliminary stage includes the selection of source texts to be translated, the choice of translation strategies, and the adoption of translation styles, etc. while the operational stage consists of the decoding stage and the encoding stage.In the decoding stage, the translator first acts as a reader, trying to understand the original, and then rewrites the information he/she captures. Owing to ideological manipulation, the translator may misread the original. However, the encoding stage sees more concrete manipulation generated from ideology through applications of translation skills such as deletion, addition, abbreviation, word-choice, etc. The ideological manipulation in these two stages has been illustrated from different perspectives. They include, among others, religious misreading, ethical interference, and aesthetic filtering.