An Analysis Of The Translation Of Red Star Over China In Light Of Lefevere's Rewriting Theory

Western translation criticism witnesses a change with the emergence of a culture-oriented approach to translation studies in the 1970s, which studies translation as a cultural and historical phenomenon in a descriptive manner, exploring its context and its conditioning factors and searching for grounds that can explain why a translation looks like that. The old criteria of"fidelity"and"equivalence"are dismissed. AndréLefevere, one of the most influential scholars in the culture-oriented translation studies, put forward his rewriting theory, namely, translation is a kind of rewriting because it is constrained by the ideology, poetics and patronage in the target culture. This paper, in light of the rewriting theory, analyses two Chinese translations of Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China, focusing on the ideological influence on translation strategy. It is found that both translations are affected by the dominant ideology of their times and the translators adapt the original in three major ways—omission, deviation and adding; besides, the places where adaptation occurs are somewhat different between the two versions due to different social backgrounds.