A Study On The Translations Of Uncle Tom's Cabin From The Perspective Of Ideology

The ideological influence on translation has been ignored until the 1980s when "cultural turn" emerged in translation studies. Translation is no longer simply regarded as the transfer between languages. In contrast, it is the result of certain social, historical and cultural influence. Till then, many western translation scholars began to study the relationship between translation and ideology. One of them is Andre Lefevere with his famous theory that translation is rewriting.Based on such theory, this thesis analyzes three Chinese translations of Uncle Tom's Cabin produced in different historical periods (including the Late Qing Dynasty, the time before Cultural Revolution as well as the end of the 20^th century), with the purpose to find their different "rewritings" of the original one as well as the reasons in order to answer the following questions: whether "rewritings" are the results of ideology? Whether there are some differences between the rewritings with the development of society?The author mainly adopts the comparative approach in this thesis: first, she compares the three different translations with the original one respectively; then, she focuses on the differences between the three translations.Through such analysis, the author finds that "rewritings" are really the result of ideology. Lin Shu rewrites the original one on purpose in order to make the Chinese literati of the Late Qing Dynasty to accept the western thinking by replacing the Christian ideas with traditional Chinese ideas. As for Huang Jizhong and Wang Jiaxiang, they rewrite unconsciously: Huang Jizhong is deeply influenced by Chinese Classical literature and he uses a lot of idioms and set phrases. Wang Jiaxiang rewrites the least, especially on the level of syntax. Her translation also reflects the penetration of the western culture into the Chinese culture. Meanwhile, the diachronic analysis of the three Chinese translations manifests the different roles of Chinese and Western cultures in different historical periods of China.