A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Vanity Fair In The Light Of "Rewriting" Theory

Vanity Fair is William Thackeray's masterpiece, in which the author depicted a picture of the upper class of England in the first half of the 19th century and attacked the social order of the bourgeois world by satirizing the various individuals in different strata of the upper society. Since Vanity Fair was introduced to China in the early 20th century, various Chinese versions have come out, among which, the versions of Yang Bi and Peng Changjiang are the most outstanding two. The former is famous for its usage of fluent and typical Chinese, which features the translator's domestication strategy; the latter, on the other hand, distinguishes itself as a foreignized version.Why are the two versions so different? What are the reasons that make the two translators choose different strategies? With these questions in mind, the author of this thesis decides to compare these two versions. However, the traditional methods of comparing versions of a literary work have always focused on the analysis on the linguistic level, which is aimed to find out their degrees of fidelity to the original while little attention has been paid to the operation of translation activities in the target culture. Within this scope, researchers are often restricted by shackles of the conception of "source text" and examine very little about the interrelationship between translation activities and the target culture.Due to these limitations the present study compares the two versions from a macroscopical point of view and raises two research questions: 1. What are the cultural factors that shape the appearance of the two versions? 2. How do these factors function?In order to answer these two questions, this thesis adopts AndréLefevere's "rewriting" theory as the framework and applies his four norms, namely ideology, poetics, patronage and the professional as the research subjects to examine whether they have any influence on the images of these two versions. After a close examination, this study reaches the conclusion that these four factors yield tremendous effects on the two translators' choices of strategies and they function in an integrated way in shaping the images of these two versions. The research result proves the validity of the "rewriting" theory and in turn adds abundant amount of examples to this theory.Besides, this thesis also highlights translator's subjectivity by examining the two translators' acceptance of the dominant translation theories at their times and points out the importance for translators to cultivate theoretical awareness of the essence of this discipline so as to become competent mediators in cultural exchanges instead of being puppets "manipulated" by external environment.