On The Late Qing Fiction Translation In Terms Of Dialogicality Of Translation

The late Qing Dynasty witnessed the very first literary translating activity, among which the fiction translation was the most prosperous. The apparent instrumentalism and the strong political hue of the late Qing fiction translation attracted many scholars'attention and made it a very hot topic. However, the previous studies were either too narrow with their perspectives confined to individualism (the text-centered, the author-centered, the translator-centered and the reader-centered theories), or too broad with the all-embracing cultural perspective. Both of them were not comprehensive or dynamic. Concerning this, the present thesis combines Bakhtin's dialogue theory and the translation studies, and probes into the late Qing fiction translation from a brand new perspective, that is, the dialogicality of translation.For the translation studies, the time of monologic utterance was ended by the philosophy hermeneutics, and dialogue has become the mainstream. In the context of economic globalization and highly-developing cross-cultural communication, Bakhtin's dialogue theory provides the fundamental basis for the study on the dialogicality of translation. Translation, as the behavior of constructing utterance in specific social and historical contexts, possesses the nature of dialogism: translation is a dialogue between two cultures from the macroscopic point of view; while from the microscopic point of view, it is a dialogue between author, translator and readers with the given text as the topic.With the guidance of the dialogic principle, the present thesis, after careful studies, leads to its own conclusion: when the late Qing fiction translation campaign is investigated, not only should the social, cultural and historical factors be discussed, which affect the selection of source texts, translation strategies and translation methods, but the characteristics of the texts and the multi-dialogicality of the fiction translation (dialogue between original text/author and readers/translator, dialogue between translator and target readers, dialogue between translated versions and target readers) should also be noticed and explored.It is helpful for their comprehensive and profound understanding of the late Qing fiction translation if the readers delve into it from a more proper synchronic and diachronic dialogic model. Meanwhile, this approach is more consistent with the new trend of translation studies in the context of Globalization. Dialogue possesses the nature of unfinalizability. The late Qing fiction translation has been developed in the dialogic process. The research on it, as a dialogue, will also be proceeding in the continuous tense.