Study On Three Chinese Versions Of The Picture Of Dorian Gray From Manipulation Of Ideology In Literary Translation

As one of the representative writers of Aestheticism in the late 1800s, Oscar Wilde is considered as a generalist in art. His works, many of which are unanimously regarded as masterpieces by posterity, relate to fairy tales, dramas, novels, poems and so on. Multitudes of these works have been translated into various languages, thus being widely spread all over the world. Consequently, he occupies a unique position in the history of world literature.The Picture of Dorian Gray is the sole full-length novel written by Oscar Wilde, in which the hero, Dorian Gray, possesses beauty, youth, wealth, and all. Such a Faustian figure exchanges his soul with the portrait of himself for eternal beauty and infinite youth. Therefore, he himself possesses the everlasting beauty and can do whatever he likes, including murdering the painter. The portrait, however, which grows older and older in place of him, and bears all the unforgivable crimes Dorian Gray has committed, becomes a portrayal of his reprobate soul in the end. Due to anti-decadence of the Victorian era and homosexual love tendency revealed in it, the novel was extremely controversial when it was firstly published in Britain. Served as a representative literary work of Aestheticism novel which combines the characteristics of Gothic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray is accepted and loved by more and more readers afterwards.Integrated with ideologies and literary trends of thought in various periods, Chinese scholars have undertaken diversified researches towards Oscar Wilde together with his works, which climax three times. They have probed into Aestheticism thoughts and concepts of literature and arts embodied in this novel from various kinds of perspectives, such as aesthetics, psychology, ecocriticism, Myth and Archetypal criticism, etc. There have been no lack of such kinds of treatises which have touched upon translation studies of this novel. Nevertheless, the investigative objectives of most of these treatises have been focused on individual translation methods and strategies. Seldom have translators studied the development of versions against the background of culture.The schools of translation studies showed great cultural awareness in the early 1970s. Thus, in the following researches of translation theories, more and more attention has been paid to explore the external factors which have influenced literary translation. As one of the most important components of culture, ideology as well as culture has gradually become a research focus among the scholars in the field of translation. Andre Lefevere, an American translation theorist, brought forward manipulation theory, which could be considered as the theoretic basis for cultural school of translation studies. He argued that translation was an ideology-manipulated rewriting of original texts. Translation would inevitably be influenced and constrained by ideology. Therefore, it's necessary and realistically significant to analyze the development of versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray against the background of periodical culture, together with the factor of individual translators so that the cultural information behind different translations can be understood and accepted by more and more readers.Corresponding to the three high tides of research of Oscar Wilde in China, this dissertation attempts to choose typical translations of the three distinct periods respectively. With reference to Andre Lefevere's "rewriting" theory, the author employs the method of descriptive translation studies and probes into the impact of ideology on translation by comparing the three versions.