An Ideological Perspective On Giles' Rewriting Of Liao Zhai Zhi Yi

Lefevere once said that translation is, of course, a rewriting of an original text. Rewriting is manipulation, undertaken in the service of power. All rewritings, whatever their intention, reflect a certain ideology. Thus, the production of a translation is at the request of a certain ideology of that time in target culture, and was judged by its criteria. Herbert Allen Giles' version——Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, not only shared the highest reputation, but also was claimed widely to contain the most stories, thus was chosen to be studied in this dissertation. This dissertation plans to make a research from ideological perspective to apply a descriptive study to the relationship between ideology and translation. Based on this, this dissertation takes the neutral attitude towards ideology and just descriptively records the translation phenomena in the target texts and tries to find out possible explanations. From the changes in a certain target text contrasting with source text, how ideology of patronage, target readers and the translators rewrite the source text is clearly analyzed in this dissertation.Pu Songling, the author of the source text, dedicated his entire life into the imperial examination in hope of success and great fortune but was always turned down. To make a living, he alone worked as a clerk for some time and private tutor for years for officials. During these years he witnessed the dark side of official circles and also luxurious lives. Along with what he experienced, what he had saw inspired him to write his masterpiece for fulmination to the dark society and also a wish to help himself out through the hand of a discerning ruler in the same but cleaned society.However, all these were barely found in Giles' version. Giles have made a lot of changes in his translation, to the extent that his version reads more like a collection of stories of Chinese ghosts and foxes in stead of a satire as the original. A further consideration on the ideology of England and English readers and also the author of that time may explain why this happened. It was the composition of these three forces that worked on the translator to rewrite a target text for the acceptance of it in target culture.Basically, the target text is the rewriting of the source text according to the ideological demands of that time.