Appellations For Mythic Images: Mythological Manipulation Of Translation Strategies

Within the broader cultural context in which heterogeneous cultures are being syncretized with one another, contemporary translation studies, the Cultural School in particular, characterized by cultural turn, theoretic permeation and interdisciplinary integration, advocates that translation should be cross-culturally studied from the cultural horizon. Inspired by this viewpoint and taking the two English versions of the mythic novel Xi You Ji, respectively translated by Anthony C. Yu and W.J.F. Jenner, as the case study and resorting to Lefevere's theory of ideological manipulation, the author is intended, from the perspective of cultural study, to explore the manipulation of translation strategies by the mythic conceptions, which is within the category of ideology as a layer of culture. This is in conformity with Venuti's cultural standpoint to conduct the analysis of translation strategies choice, domestication or foreignization.The theoretical foundation is the manipulation theory of the Manipulation School, especially the ideological manipulation theory of American translation theorist Andre Lefevere. The subject of this case study, Xi You Ji, is a well-known mythic fiction which generally exhibits the traditional Chinese mythic conceptions. Hence, the appellations for the three groups of mythic images portrayed in the ST (source text), Xi You Ji, are circled to be the objects to develop this research on the one hand, and the three types of mythic conception are the focused manipulative factors on the other hand. After discussing the manipulation of the designing mythic images by different mythic conceptions, the research explores the fact that the two translators' adoptions of translation strategies are manipulated by the mythic conceptions while translating these appellations.This dissertation consists of six chapters.The first chapter gives a brief introduction to the theoretical foundation of this research, the manipulation theory of the Manipulation School in translation studies, especially Lefevere's manipulation theory, and proposes that the mythological manipulation extended from his ideological manipulation theory is a new horizon in translation studies; it then points out that the subject of the case study is Xi You Ji and its two English versions; finally this chapter presents the significance, methodology of this research and the organization of this thesis.Chapter 2 discusses the three types of mythic conceptions reflected in the source text, the conception of mythic heroes, god-immortals and evil spirits, and then deals with the collection and classification of the appellations used for the different mythic images in the ST and in the TTs (target texts).Chapter 3, 4 and 5 are the main body of this paper with a similar structure. In the light of Lefevere's ideological manipulation, the exploration is conducted to analyze the manipulation of the mythic images and of the translation strategies by different mythic conceptions, and then the possible cultural findings in the translated products are pointed out as a supplementary part to these chapters.The last chapter presents the conclusion of this research. The exploration indicates that while rendering the appellations functioning as proper terms, in spite of their different cultural backgrounds, the two cultural transmitters both manipulated by the mythic conceptions from the SC (source culture) as well as those from the TC (target culture), simultaneously adopt foreignization as the primary strategy with domestication as an auxiliary one. Such adoption of foreignization projects Chinese characteristic manner of expression of the appellations. Moreover, whatever strategy is adopted, the translations could not completely realize cultural equivalence, and the special cultural connotations are whether damaged or twisted.