On The Translation Of Gulliver's Travels From The Perspective Of Rewriting Theory

Gulliver's Travels is generally regarded as a terrific satirical novel written by the great English prose satirist Jonathan Swift. Although there are disputes on the genre of Gulliver's Travels, many researchers and experts agree that satire is the most remarkable feature of Gulliver's Travels. However, when it was introduced to China and translated into Chinese in the early decades of twentieth-century, it was evolved into a fairy tale. This thesis tries to make a comprehensive and historical study of the relevant translation activities of Gulliver's Travel in the early decades of twentieth-century. Meanwhile, guided by AndréLefevere's rewriting theory, the author intends to put the translation of Gulliver's Travels into a macro social and cultural background and discuss the ideological and poetological influence on translations of Gulliver's Travel.In AndréLefevere's view, translation is rewriting of an original text. All rewritings, whatever their intentions, reflect a certain ideology and a poetics and manipulate literature to function in a given society in a given way. Lefevere puts forward three constraints under which translators operate. They are ideology, poetics and patronage. Since the historical documents concerning patronage of these translations are not available, the constraint of patronage will not be the main concern of this thesis.This thesis is mainly a historical research and descriptive study on the translations of Gulliver's Travels, which consists of five parts. Introduction part mainly proposes the subject and methodology of the research. Chapter one is the literature review of Gulliver's Travels and its translations and researches in China as well as the theoretical framework of this thesis. Chapter two and Chapter three analyze the dominant ideology and poetics in the target culture respectively, aiming at finding out the specific influence of ideology and poetics on the translations of Gulliver's Travels in the early decades of twentieth-century. Then comes the conclusion of this thesis.By tracing back to the translation of Gulliver's Travels in China in the early decades of twentieth-century, the author finds out that various factors resulted in the rewriting of Gulliver's Travels in the process of translation. These factors include dominant ideological differences, the political and institutional differences between the source culture and target culture, the social and ethical norms, the dominant poetics as well as the reception of readers.The application of Andre Lefevere's rewriting theory helps again to understand the possibility of applying western translation theories to solve the problems involved in translation from foreign language into Chinese. It would provide a new perspective to explain some problems in translation, which cannot be solved through traditional translation studies. Based on the previous studies, this thesis discusses the influence of ideology and poetics in translations of Gulliver's Travels from the perspective of rewriting theory, which shows the originality of this study.