A Probe Into Lin Shu's Phenomenon-The Miracle In The Translation History

China's modern period spans from the Opium War in 1840 to the May Fourth Movement in 1919. Many Chinese elites tried their best to find ways to save the country and its people, and one of the important ways was to learn from the West, introducing western knowledge to China to cultivate people's minds by means of translation. Lin Shu (1852-1924) was a prolific and highly influential translator in introducing western literary works into Chinese. Though Lin Shu does not know any foreign languages, yet his unfaithful translations were warmly received by the readers then and produced a tremendous social and cultural impact. This unique translation phenomenon cannot be explained by the traditional translation theory, which is preoccupied with the evaluation of the target text based on its degree of faithfulness to the source text.In 1990, Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere, two representatives of Translation Studies School, suggested that translation studies should take a "cultural turn". In light of the Polysystem Theory of Even-Zohar and the Manipulation Theory of Andre Lefevere, the thesis intends to analyze Lin Shu, the great translator in late Qing period in a comprehensive way integrated with the special social background of the then China.This thesis includes six chapters.Chapter 1 begins with a brief introduction of Lin Shu's translation and the motivation of the thesis to study the factors behind Lin Shu's phenomenon.Chapter 2 clarifies its theoretical basis, that is, the Polysystem Theory of Even-Zohar and the Manipulation Theory of Andre Lefevere.Chapter 3 is the main body of the thesis. Based on Andre Lefevere's theory of ideology and poetics, this part makes a detailed study of various ideological and poetological factors that might manipulate Lin Shu's employment of domestication in his translation in that special historical time.Chapter 4 is about the impact of China's socio-cultural context on Lin Shu's translation activities. The analysis of Lin Shu's translation activities will be concentrated on three elementary aspects: his choice of language variety, his choice of the originals and his choice of translation strategies.Chapter 5 discusses the impact of Lin Shu's translations on China's socio-cultural context, which is reflected both in the aspects of ideology and poetics.Chapter 6 draws a conclusion of the correlation between China's socio-cultural context then and Lin Shu's translation activities.