An Ideological Perspective On Eileen Chang's Translation

Eileen Chang was the most outstanding legendary female writer in the twentieth century in China. Since the 1940s, criticisms and researches on Eileen Chang have not been interrupted, but have become increasingly fierce. The fever of Eileen Chang has spread from the academic circle to ordinary readers. Eileen Chang's death in 1995 raised another fever. All kinds of works dealing with Eileen Chang published successively as well as many of her own works which have not been found before. In fact, Eileen Chang was an excellent translator as well as an outstanding writer. However, academic researches on Eileen Chang have been confined in the field of her literary creation. Very few scholars have touched upon her literary translation.As early as the middle twentieth century, translation studies in the west have begun to integrate translation with culture context which provided a brand new perspective for researches on translation.Andrew Lefevere, one representative of the Translation Studies School, brought translation activities into researches on culture system, discussed how social and cultural factors affect translators'choice of the original texts and translation strategies. He also proposed the celebrated thesis that translation was rewriting. Different translators in different cultural environments and historical backgrounds have different ideological tendencies. In order to make their translations be accepted by more readers, translators always trying to make their translations to fit for the target language readers'ideology and poetics. Occasionally, some translators will oppositely adopt a strategy of resistant translation. Although Chinese translation study has a long tradition, it only focused on translation criteria, translation techniques and so on, lacking systematic researches on translation subjects. In China scholars who studied Lefevere's manipulation theory always focusing on ideology, hardly any people have touched on poetics. This thesis tries to.analyze Eileen Chang's translation under the guidance of Andrew Lefevere's theory.Based on Eileen Chang's translated works of different periods including the American literature works and Chinese literature works whose genres cover from novels to poems, this thesis tries to prove Lefevere's theory again by analyzing a translator's practice of different time from the ideological perspective. In the part of texts analyses, the author uses a descriptive-explanatory method to make a comparative analyse with Eileen Chang's translated works, the original texts and other translators'translations in detail. The purpose is to reveal how ideology, poetics, and patronage affect translators'translation practice in different social and cultural environments. The conclusion is that a translator's translation practice was more or less affected by ideological influences. Ideological influences affect a translator's selection of the original texts, the translator's choice of translation strategies and so on. Even the reflection of a translator and his or her translated works is under the control of the ideology of a certain time. The receptions and popularity of translated works are affected by all kinds of factors such as the dominant ideology, the ideology of patronages and the ideology of the translator and so on. It depends on which is the very factor that gets the upper hand. So we can not draw an inference simply according to the reactions of one's translated works. We should put one's translation practice in a certain historical social background and make an impersonal comment. This thesis not only proves Lefevere's theory again, but also develops researches on Eileen Chang.