Traveling And Translation Of Andersen’s Fairy Tales In China: An Ideological Perspective

Andersen is a great fairy tale writer familiar to all Chinese readers. The translationand transmission of Andersen’s fairy tales to China is the great fortune in the history ofChinese children’s literature. Because they not only set up the basic foundation forchildren’s literature, but greatly promote the emergence and development of Chinesechildren’s literature. Andersen’s fairy tales have won great fame since they were firstintroduced to China by Zhou Zuoren in1913. During the following almost100years,they have immediately become the spiritual food for Chinese children and have graduallybeen mixed up as an inevitable part of Chinese culture.The thesis briefly discusses the relationship and influence between textual travel,ideology and translation, extending a concise introduction of the background of thesprout of Chinese children’s literature as well as the bringing of Andersen’s fairy tales inChina. On this basis, the thesis gives a diachronic description of the translators’ rewritingand manipulation of Andersen’s fairy tales under the influence of different socialideology in different historical context. In this process, the author focuses to analyze thetranslation strategies that translators choose at different times to stress the leading rolethat ideology plays when translators are doing the translation of Andersen’s fairy tales,through which the author aims to elaborate the translators’ transformation of Andersen’sfairy tales under the new context and focuses to make a thorough survey of the variationsor convergences of Andersen’s fairy tales. The thesis intends to make clear thatAndersen’s fairy tales have been explained or translated by translators at different timesin the almost100years’ travel in China. However, these differences that existed betweenthe original text and the translated one or between different translated versions aremarked by social ideology under the influence of different historical context. Therefore,there is no final edition for translation and all the translation is, of course, a rewriting of the original text by translators under the influence of specific ma instream culture orideology.