The Conditioning Power Of Some Factors Over Translation Selections

It is believed that the 1990s witnesses the peak of translation in China. This is concretely reflected in the retranslation of the literary masterpieces of foreign countries, especially those from France, England and Germany. For one original, there are at least two or three Chinese versions, sometimes even more. Taking this into consideration, translation criticism is necessitated on the basis of translation comparison in order to find problems in retranslation and improve the quality of translation; what's more important, comparative analysis of translation provides an effective perspective for translation studies to reconsider those controversial problems which have puzzled scholars in this field for many years.As is well known, translation is a process of making selections; each stage consists of numerous selections, ranging from material selection to a single word section. They are, however, not conducted in vacuum, but conditioned by many factors outside translation activity. In the past thirty years, the focus of translation has been partly shifted from language and text to the relationship between translation and social culture, paying even more attention to exterior factors outside translation action, i.e. different translation purposes are established under different historic and cultural contexts and the purposes at various levels manipulate the process of translation in order to realize some cultural functions of translation. So far, there have been a lot of articles about conditioning power of factors over translation selection, but majority of them discuss problems from the theoretical perspective and lack empirical research. This research, based on such translation theories as descriptive translation studies (DTS), skopostheory and manipulation theory at the macroscopic level, approaches the three different versions of Wuthering Heights through quantitative study to find out the textual features and examine microscopic translation selections, translation strategies, the cultural stance of the translators and their relationship with the factors outside the text, making an attempt to explain the translation selections by different translators. Conclusions are reached that translation studies are supposed to start from comparative study of translations and generalize the textual features of translations to find out translation laws. This research further indicates that ideas from the cultural approaches in translation studies are related to translation study in a limited way and its fundamental task is to examine the language phenomena of translation instead of being confined to the small number of facts associated with culture, thus partly falsifying the legitimateness of some of these approaches.