On The Relationship Between Translation And The Outside Elements From The Perspective Of Post-colonialism

All kinds of approaches to translation studies can be generally divided into two categories from the philosophy perspective which are structural and deconstructive approaches. The traditional studies in translation belong to structuralism, which are confined to the level of language, holding the idea that meaning is static and certain, aiming at the equivalence of meaning; on the contrary, deconstruction studies deny the utopian theoretical premises of the structuralism by strict logical analysis and philosophical argumentation. It puts translation back into the authentic historical and spatial context and draws the conclusion that meaning is dynamic and uncertain. Deconstructive translation studies are interdisciplinary, involving non-language subjects, one of which is post-colonialism. Post-colonialism, which had been studied in the 1980s, is typical of its particular angle of view and sharp criticism. The combination of post-colonialism and translation study made the post-colonial translation come into being. This new approach to translation sets the translation activity in a much broader background of culture, history and society from a high perspective. It brings outside elements such as politics, culture and power relations into the scope of translation studies.The first half part of this thesis makes retrospection on the"cultural turn"in translation studies, and casts back the theories of the post-colonial translation studies. This part introduces the direct theoretical fundaments of post-colonial translation which are anti-traditional deconstruction and critical post-colonialism, and focuses on the application of these two theories in the field of translation as well as the theories of post-colonialism translation. Derrida's deconstructive theories set up the fundaments for it,the most important contribution of which is the subversion of logocentrism and the destruction of the binary opposition. Applied in the translation studies, it is realized that the belief that the meaning of the original text can be grasped, transferred and represented completely is just a myth, and the criterion of"utmost faithfulness"can never be met. The relationship between the original text and the translated text is no longer simply that between the source and the representation, the domination and the submission. Instead of logocentrism,"différance"is put forward by Derrida, which means that meaning will change in different spaces and vary in other time. Translated text is the variation of the original text, and the original can not control the translated. Therefore it can be said that the translated text is a new text in a different time and space, and the text exists in the context.Post-colonial translation is the study of translation in the context of post-colony. The context of post-colony does not just refer to the culture and speech relationship between the suzerain states and the colonized countries after the end of colonialism, but it has spread to the power relations, the suppression, imitation and resistance between the strong culture and the weak culture. The study of post-colonial translation pays close attention to the translation under the unbalanced power relations between different cultures and the roles translation plays in preserving and subverting these power relations. This part introduces the highly influential theorists in the study of post-colonial translation and the books of them, including Laurence Venuti, Eric Cheyfitz, Tejaswini Niranjana and Douglas Robinson. The study of translation from the post-colonial perspective has already gained the full glare of publicity on the international scene of translation studies.Under the theoretical confirming of the effects that translation and the outside elements play on each other, the latter part of this paper tries to examine how they have effect on each other from the post-colonial perspective. The relationship can be put into two kinds: how the outside elements restrict or promote translation; what influences translation has on power relations. The author discusses the first kind of relationship from the angles of ideology, patronage, politics and the disparity between cultures. And the second kind of relationship can be further divided into the role translation plays as a tool to set power relations and a measure to fight against power relations.