A Study On Omission In Literary Translation In Social And Cultural Contexts

Translation studies, for a long time, have adopted a prescriptive approach, mainly emphasizing the"accurate transference"of linguistic signs. Under the influence of such a view, a translation norm has formed, promoting the fundamental value of being"faithful"in translation practice. Accordingly, the term of omission, which suggests negative meanings, is not encouraged. Nevertheless, many professional translators still delete(d) words, sentences, sometimes even more consistent parts of source texts, and their translation works with omissions do and did receive great popularity.Since the late 1980s, influenced by"cultural studies","the cultural turn"has occurred in translation studies and many scholars have advocated studying translation in social and cultural contexts. They claim that translation activities have never taken place in a vacuum, instead, they tend to occur in a certain historical context and become part of that history. The contextualization of translation involves a reorientation in translation studies which bring first culture and then politics and power into the picture, enabling us to study both textual and extratextual constraints upon the translator, rather than confining the studies to the mere transformation of linguistic signs from source texts to target texts. All this is what descriptive translation studies show concern for.Based on the approach of descriptive translation studies and Lefevere's system theory, the thesis tries to examine whether and in what ways the adoption of omission is influenced by factors of the target culture by studying examples of omission in two versions of David Copperfield translated by Lin Shu and Lin Handa and by exploring ideological and poetological background at the times the translations came into being. The results of the study are listed as follows:a. By studying examples of omission taken from the two translation versions of David Copperfield, the author finds that different kinds of information in the original work were deleted by the two translators. Contents omitted in these examples, in most cases, happen to run counter to the dominant ideology and poetics at the times when the translations came into being. Thus, omissions occur in translations under the influence of the target culture.b. The study shows that ideology, political component of ideology in particular, works on translators and plays a vital part in their adopting omission. Most of the time, it even constrains poetics of a certain time, which in turn cause some omissions to occur. Especially when political ideology is highly stressed and control factors both inside and outside the cultural system are highly integrated, as is the case in the 1950s, it proves to be more obvious that social and cultural factors exert influence on the translator's choice.All in all, omissions in literary translations, instead of being mere deviations from source texts, witness conflicts of different cultural systems, conflicts of ideologies and poetics in this case. Further, the adoption of omission in translation works contributes to the consolidation of ideology and poetics in the target culture.