A Brief Remark Of Manipulated Translation Of Children's Literature

Along with the"cultural turn"of translation study, the theory of translation gets itself out of the limit of linguistics, and began to turn to research upon the impact of culture and power upon the process of translation. And the observation of target text has become the major focus of translation study.This paper gives an introduction of Even-Zohar's polysystem theory and Levefere's theory of manipulation and rewriting which developed from the inheritage and criticism of Zohar's theory. And under the guidance of their theories, a study is carried out on the condition of Chinese children's literature translation in a history of more than one hundred year.Different from Even-Zohar's Polysystem theory, Lefevere's theories put more emphasis on the description of the translation from the perspective of culture in a complicated social and cultural environment. The word'manipulation'was right suggested by him which opened a new door for researchers in this field. According to him, language is just one factor which influence the process of translation. The whole process is manipulated by many factors apart from language which are closely related to culture. The theory of rewriting is another important part of Lefevere's theory. He holds that translators are also rewriters of source text; they determine the'image'and position of the source text in the target literary system through their translation.The study of children's literature and its translation has always been in a neglected position. Among all those books of children's literature which have had great influence on Chinese children, we can't deny that the translated ones hold a large proportion. And the establishment of Chinese children's literature in the modern sense owes much to the translation of foreign children's literature. In this paper, three stages of translation climax are picked out for research: the May 4th period, from after liberation till before"the cultural Revolution", and from 1980s till now. It illustrates the impact of ideology on the choice of source text. After that is a case study of two translated versions of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows rendered separately by Yang Jingyuan and Ren Rongrong, and the study shows how a translator conducts concrete manipulation upon the target text.