A Study Of A Literary Society

The Creation Society is one of the two most important literary societies in China in the 1920s. Its translation of the foreign literatures has exerted a positive influence on Chinese literature and culture. Meanwhile, its members published a series of critiques on translation issues, which contributes greatly to the poetry translation.To set an example for the translation study of a literary society, this thesis attempts to take the translation activities of the early Creation Society (June 1921 to May 1924) as an example. By adopting Lefevere's theory as the main theoretical framework, this study investigates its translations and critiques published in its periodicals, namely, Creation Quarterly, Creation Weekly and Creation Daily.Based on the original material and the existing achievements, this paper studies its translation activities from three perspectives: its selection of translated texts, its translation strategies, and its translation criticism. In terms of the choice of translated texts, the author first seeks out the main tendency of its translated texts by totaling the exact number of each genre, and then systematically investigates four reasons that gave the impulse to the translations of those texts: historical and cultural circumstances;their personal background;the ideological and poetic reasons. Furthermore, this paper analyzes the translation strategies of the early Creation Society by focusing on those of Guo Moruo and Cheng Fangwu since they put forward their translation strategies clearly. In addition, the author studies the significance and limitations of its translation criticism from four aspects: its contribution to the construction of translation theory;its criticism of bad translation or translation errors;its remarks on the ethics of the translator and critic as well as its comments on the direct and indirect translation.