| Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) is a personage who received a lot of dispute in the history of Chinese and Western cultural exchanges. As a special cultural phenomenon, she is widely concerned by the scholars both at home and abroad. Pearl is the first westerner who translated the 70 chapters of Shui Hu Zhuan into English under the title of All Men Are Brothers. As soon as her translation was published, it was well received by the Western countries. However, All Men Are Brothers was frowned upon by translation critics in China. The criticism focused on the Chinese style expression in the target language. Though All Men Are Brothers suffers great criticism, few researches have been conducted to explore why Pearl translated Shui Hu Zhuan in such a debatable way.The intense Chinese flavor in All Men Are Brothers manifests Pearl's cultural attitude and literature standpoint. Her dual culture identities could not be accepted both by America and China under the given historical background. The embarrassing status played a crucial role in shaping her cultural characteristic that made Pearl dedicated her entire life to the communication between Chinese and western culture, opposing cultural hegemony and ethnocentrism, and defending the dignity of Chinese culture, which results in her distinctive translating strategy.Armed with Lefevere's theory of ideology and poetics, this dissertation presents its research framework, probing into the reasons for the selection of Pearl's translating strategy, describing the translating process, in the hope of explaining Pearl's unusual translating activity. Pearl's cultural attitude, which is shaped by the conflict between China and America in social ideology, attributes to the notion of ideology in theoretical perspective. All Men Are Brothers manifests Pearl's dual cultural attitude of "seeking common points while reserving difference" vividly. Pearl's literature standpoint belongs to the notion of poetics. She possessed a reading scope of cross culture and language since childhood. With the western literature as the frame of reference, Pearl formed her individual poetics which biased her toward Chinese literature. The main body of this dissertation analyzes Pearl's culture attitude and literature standpoint in depth, considering their important function in her translating activity. Apart from that, the dominant social ideology and poetics in the original culture and their influence on Pearl's translation are also elucidated. Finally, the dissertation clarifies the misunderstandings of domestic translation critics on Pearl and takes the seventh chapter of Shui Hu Zhuan as the case to expatiate on Pearl's translation from the aspects of its vocabulary, sentences and passage. On the basis of data colleted and findings, the dissertation analyzes the strategy Pearl adopted in keeping the cultural image and characteristics of Chinese language, thus combining the description of dynamic translating process organically with static text analysis, by which the whole dissertation is further supplemented and reinforced.This dissertation also carries certain theoretical and practical significance. Firstly, through the discussion, it is found that a theory can be complemented and consummated in application. Secondly, this dissertation provides a framework for the research of translators with dual or even plural cultural identities. |
