A Study On The Variations In The English Version Sanliwan Village Of Zhao Shuli’s San Li Wan

San Li Wan was written by Zhao Shili, the founder of the “potato school”(山药蛋派) of literature, and attracted great attention since its publication in1955. It wastranslated into English by famous translator Gladys Yang in1957. However, to ourdisappointment, the English version has not gained due attention at home and abroad.Literary translation as an efficient way to spread our culture to the west deserves ourattention and study. Therefore, based on comparative literature theory and thewestern modern cultural translation theory, this thesis takes San Li Wan as a casestudy to do a tentative study on the causes of the variations of cultural elements inthe translation from Chinese into English.Variation, as a comparative literature phenomenon, refers to the omissions,deviations, cultural misreading and cultural filter in this thesis. The variations ofwords are first discussed in this thesis. The nationality of Zhao Shuli’s works ismainly embodied by the language of the works. Zhao Shuli always takes peasants’need and habit of speech into consideration when he writes and thus his works are allcolloquialized in terms of the tone and grammar. After a thorough research, thenationalized language and cultural images undergo distortion and lose, the reason forwhich lies in the distinction of the languages and cultures between China and theWest. Therefore, the English version is the rewriting of the original text. Next, thisthesis discusses the variation in narrative discourse. We find out that in the Englishversion the guide words in the reported speech are almost omitted. Besides, whendealing with the rhetorical questions and reduplicated words in the original work, thetranslator has also had them variated in order to accord with the dominant poetics ofthe English world. At last, this thesis analyzes the characterization of Fan Teng-gao,Liu Lao-wu and Americans. Be enslaved to her understanding of capitalism and theneed of potential readers of the English version, the translator intentionally changedtheir images. The variation is the embodiment of the marginalization of orientalliterature, the asymmetrical power relations between the West and East and the manipulation of translator’s ideology and dominant poetics in the target culture.Therefore, based on the above discussion, it can be safely concluded that after San LiWan is rendered into a new cultural context, variations inevitably occur due to thetranslator’ ideology and the difference between culture traditions, poetics andlanguages. Therefore, we can say that translation is innovation and innovation isvariation.The research value and contributions of this thesis lie in the following twoaspects: first, we hope this thesis will enrich the text-centered research of the literarytranslation. Second, we hope it will provoke thoughts on how to properly spreadChinese literature, especially “potato school”(山药蛋派) of literature to the west.