English-Chinese Literary Translation Strategies: Toward A Polysystem-based Integrated Perspective

With the increase of interlingual and intercultural communication in this era of the Global Village and the World Wide Web, English-Chinese (E-C) literary translation is prospering and reaching a higher level of proficiency and quality. Meanwhile, translation researchers are gaining more and more insights into it from multidisciplinary perspectives. There remain, however, still much confusion and many partial or isolated conceptions of E-C literary translation strategies in both the fields of E-C translation practice and translation studies. It is therefore both significant (to translation practice) and necessary (for translation studies) to conduct more integrated studies of E-C literary translation strategies.Guided by the dialectical systemic view of translation formulated by Jia Zhengchuan, employing Even-Zohar's polysystem theory combined with"descriptive translation studies", manipulation theory, and skopos theory, and other relevant perspectives as a theoretical basis, applying a methodology involving both theoretical and empirical, both qualitative and quantitative procedures, and utilizing the two Chinese versions of David Copperfield respectively produced by Dong Qiusi and Zhang Guruo as samples, the present thesis will conduct a more integrated study of E-C literary translation strategies so as to arrive at a better understanding of the relationship of strategies and various social and cultural factors.In the dialectical systemic view of translation, (literary) translation is essentially a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complex human activity system involving the transformation of a discourse in one language into a discourse in another, affecting and being affected by the situational and socio-cultural context in which it occurs. According to polysystem theory,"descriptive translation studies", manipulation theory, skopos theory, and other relevant perspectives, the choice of strategies in (literary) translation is affected by at least five socio-cultural factors: the position of translated literature within the literary polysystem, the translator's cultural attitude, ideology, purpose of translation, and the target reader's need. Since E-C literary translation is a sub-area of (literary) translation, the above understanding of translation strategies of (literary) translation in general is also necessarily true of E-C literary translation in particular. It is therefore plausible to hypothesize that the choice of strategies in E-C literary translation is also conditioned by the above-mentioned socio-cultural factors.Through a qualitative and quantitative analysis and comparison of the strategies used in the two versions of David Copperfield produced respectively by Dong Qiusi and Zhang Guruo, it can be seen that the two translators respectively employed the strategies of foreignization and domestication in the translation of the same aspects of the novel. A further analysis and comparison of the socio-cultural contexts in which these two translations were produced shows that their choice of different strategies was the result of the influence of the different (above-mentioned) socio-cultural factors of their own times. This empirical finding thus confirms the previous theoretically deduced hypothesis.The result of this study implies that, in E-C literary translation practice, the choice of strategies should be made according to the peculiarities of their own socio-cultural contexts and that, in translation studies, the discussion of E-C literary translation strategies should be integrated with that of translation contexts.