Study On Zeng Hu's Translation Of The Thorn Birds From The Perspective Of Lefevere's Manipulation Theory

Translation does not happen in vacuum. The social and cultural environment around translator shall always be influential in different stages of translation: choice of translation material, translation strategy, translation reception and popularization. Therefore, in doing translaiton study, these factors should not be neglected.Andre Lefevere is a representative of researchers who study translation from the perspective of culture. He pointed out that there were mainly three social and cutlural factors that influence translation, that is, ideology, dominant poetics and patronage. Along with this, he stated that translation was a kind of rewriting of the original. Translators in different social-historical background are manipulated by different ideology, poetics and patronage, and rewrite the original to different degree to meet the target readers' demands in different times.Lefevere's manipulation theory has gained wide attention from translation researchers in China. It has been used to explain translaiton phenomena like retranslation and mistranslation, for people to understand that the "unfaithful" phenomena is actually a result of all these manipulative factors. In the past years, literary classics written in the 19^th century and early 20^th century were the research focus of this theory, which provided evidence for the applicability of his manipulation theory. Till now, much effort has been devoted to studying the influence of the three factos respectively, but thorough study concerning all the three factors are still rare; early classics and "unfaithfulness" were focused, while little attention was given to "faithful" examples or the study of translations of contemporary literary works.With Lefevere's manipulation theory as its theoretical framework, this thesis makes a tentative study of the influence of ideology, poetics and patronage in different stages of Zeng Hu's translation of The Thorn Birds, a best-seller of the date written by an Australian female writer Colleen McCullough in 1977. Finally it proves that the ideology, poetics and patrons in China did influence the translation activities of Zeng Hu, especially in his choice of translation material, translation strategy, and the fame of the translation. But compared with rewritings in the early years of last century when literature serve the politics, the degree of rewriting in translating contemporary works is much smaller, and translation tends to be more faithful. Structurally, this thesis is comprised of six parts:The first part gives an introduction of the research background, significance of this thesis, research methods and thesis structure.Chapter One is a literary review of the past research effort devoted to the influence of ideology, poetics and patronage on translation, as well as an introduction of translations and studies of The Thorn Birds in China.Chapter Two deals with the theoretic framework. It first gives a brief introduction of the origin of Lefevere's manipulation theory and its three core concepts. Later, the three factors' influence on literary translation is discussed.Chapter Three focuses on the manipulative influence of ideology and patronage on the translation activities of The Thorn Birds. It first gives an introduction of the social background of translating The Thorn Birds, that is, the ideology in the 1980s. Then, combined with analysis of the translation products, popularity and the fame of the translation, it reveals that it is under ideological influence that the translator made his choice in translation material and decided his translation strategies, and the patronage had great influence on the publication, readers' acceptance, and litearary fame of the translation.Chapter Four studies the poetics' manipulative influence on Zeng Hu's translation strategy. The poetics of the 1980s determined that domestication be taken as the major translation strategy with foreignization being taken as the strategy in translating some parts where there was strong cultural "strangeness".Finally comes the conclusion that the social and cultural factors do have influence on different stages of translation, but due to the specific modern time and background of the translator, the degree of rewriting is apparently far smaller than that in the early period of the 20^th century.The 1980s is a transitional period in China's history. Class struggle was no longer the emphasis of people's life. After the "spiritual desert" period in the ten years of "Cultural Revolution", people demanded for accesses to more foreign literary works. In the aspect of ideology's manipulative influence on translation, constraints came more from ethics, religion than from politics. In Zeng's translation , only parts of descriptions in the original were omitted in the consideration of Chinese readers' moral acceptance. Except this, the translator kept the works as a whole.Reading was no longer for revolution, but for appreciation, entertainment as well as new knowledge. Poetics of that time was thus determined. As a kind of literary writing, the translated work should be pleasant to ears, but as a translated work, it should also preserve the "strangeness" as much as possible, so as to broaden readers' knowledge of foreign countries. Thus in translating The Thorn Birds, the translator strove for realizing the works' both informative and artistic function. This is reflected in Zeng Hu's translation that domestication was employed as the general strategy to present an elegant and vivid language, while foreignization was used to preserve the Australian flavor.The patronage's influence was reflected in both institution and person's manipulation. The two publishing houses restrict the spread of the translation and advocate and canonize the translation respectively. A professional's support and positive comment on his translation helped Zeng Hu out of the trouble of publication being delayed. In the past 20 years, Zeng Hu's translation never stopped being reprinted in China, and has roused wide interest in the academic circle, and even became one of the few contemporary foreign literature classics.It proves that the ideology, poetics and patrons in China did influence the translation of Zeng Hu. But the translator structurally preserved the whole work without making many big adjustments except the omission of several parts of sex description out of ideological consideration. This shows that rewriting in translating contemporary works is much smaller than that in translating through big gap of time and space.