On The Influence Of Power Discourse Upon Translation Exemplified By Yan Fu's Translation Tianyanlun

In the traditional translation theory, people usually regard translation as a purely linguistic craft which demands merely language skills. Their main concern is the transformation of semantic meaning from one language to another. The moment we refer to translation, terms such as faithfulness, equivalence, apery, transparency and so on would immediately occur to our mind. Therefore, it may seem inexplicable to relate translation with power(.孙会军55) Translation practice in the past was semantic meaning-oriented without taking cultural elements into consideration. However, translation has to take cultural elements into full consideration. In the early 1990s British translation theorists Susan Bassnett and Belgian scholar AndréLefevere pointed out that translation should go through the cultural turn together with linguistics and literary study, and the cultural turn brought a completely new perspective to translation study. The study of translation theory and practice are expected to be on such broader issues of context as history, philosophy, politics, psychology, anthropology and so on. A prominent achievement in the cultural turn is the focus on ideology. The power institution and power relationships will come into being with the deepening of the study on ideological perspective (王东风, 2007 vii). Power is like a huge net and its presence is elusive, that is, it alternated between presence and absence. However, power can be found everywhere. Therefore, we cannot avoid various power relationships when we do translation research no matter which field we are in or which perspective we are from. Moreover, there is something more than ideology that is related to power, such as social-historical, political, economic, religious, moral-ethic elements, etc. Translation is going through a power turn. When we talk about power, we cannot avoid influence, control or even manipulation on translation. However, not all manipulations are negative, subversive, reactionary or even aiming at killing out other cultures. On the contrary, some manipulations are quite necessary to the target culture and target readers.As the most influential and important translated version by Yan Fu, TianYanLun brought a profound influence on the Chinese society in the late 19th century and early 20th century. However, Yan Fu's translated version did not correspond to Huxley's original works. Yan made obvious changes on narrative person, original content, choice of vocabulary and structure. All these changes, which seem to be the translator's own affair, are certainly conditioned by certain power discourse at that moment. What the author wants to discuss and prove in this thesis is that the power mechanism universally exists in translation and influences many aspects of translation and any translator's intention is determined by certain power discourse in the final analysis. Based upon the famous power discourse theory put forward by French post-structuralistic philosopher Michel Foucault, this thesis will analyze the influence, control and manipulation that power discourse exercises on translation from the perspective of social power discourse and individual power discourse in order to prove that power discourse theory can be universally applied to translation study and power can determine many aspects in translation. Furthermore, some people are apt to regard power as a negative factor in translation, and this thesis tries to prove that it is improper through the analysis of manipulation phenomena. Power relationships permeate through translation, but not all power relationships bring negative or subversive influence to translation. This thesis wants to bring some implication to translation scholars that we cannot take a negative attitude the moment we refer to power and manipulation.