Study On The Translation Of Byron’s Poems In China In Light Of Rewriting Theory (1902-1924)

G. G. Byron was a romanticism poet in the19thcentury. His great poems andparticular personalities attracted Chinese attention since Liang Qichao’s firsttranslation of “The Isle of Greece”. Although studies on the translation of Byron’spoems were numerous, they were mainly confined to the late Qing periods and barelyset foot in the May4thperiod. Besides, there were few papers exploring the translationof Byron’s poems from the perspective of rewriting theory.As we know, André Lefevere is one of the representatives of the ManipulationSchool. He held that translation is the most obviously recognizable type of rewritingwhich rewrites and manipulates works of literature to various ideological and poeticalends in a given way. In this thesis, the author focuses on the case study of thetranslation of Byron’s poems from1902to1924in the light of rewriting theory anddivides the time span into two parts, setting the New Literature Revolution in1917asthe watershed so as to explore the hidden target ideological and poetical factorsinfluencing the translation practice.In the beginning, the author introduces the basic objectives, the methodologyand literature review. Then, chapter one provides an overview about André Lefevere’srewriting theory with the definition of the two main manipulating factors and theirrelationship with translation. As to the body part, chapter two and three studies thetranslation of Byron’s poems during the late Qing and early Republican periods(1902-1917) and the May4thera (1917-1924) in the light of rewriting theoryrespectively. Finally, the last part comes into a natural conclusion: the translations ofByron’s poems were manipulated by Lefevere’s two manipulating factors, namely,ideology and poetics. In other words, the versions of Byron’s poems were rewritten bytranslators based on the temporarily dominant ideology and poetics, which againdemonstrated that translation did not happen in a vacuum.