The Analysis On Sun Zhili’s Translation Strategies And Motivations

Translation is a communicative activity between languages, different cultures andnations, which re-explains the symbols according to different encodes. There is no doubt thattranslator is vital in translation activity, who devotes himself or herself to spreading humancivilizations and promoting cultural transmission among different nations. Especially thosefamous translators who have built up their own valuable translation theories are well worthstudying. Only in this way can their valuable experience and skills be collected, summarizedand absorbed. These studies can not only help formulate the rules of bilingual transformation,but also help summarize their translation features and techniques. This thesis will onlyconcern about the famous translator as well as a theorist in translation --- Sun Zhili and hisChinese version of Pride and Prejudice.Sun Zhili, a distinguished literary translator in China, Since 1979, Sun Zhili has begunto translate British American literature and has published about 30 works, He has translated6,000,000 Chinese characters and published more than 60 articles in“Chinese Translation”,“Chinese Technological Translation”and“Shanghai Translation”and other core Journals offoreign language. Because of his theoretical researches and translation practice of literature,he has got more and more attention and prestige in translation field and been listed in“Chinese Translation Dictionary”,“International Directory of Distinguished Leadership”, and“Five Thousand Personalities of the World. There are more and more researches on Sun Zhilimainly from three aspects, namely translation thought of Sun Zhili, his books or publishedarticles and his translation works. But so far, studies on Sun Zhili are only focused on thesimple summarization of his translation activities and translation theories or introduction of his translation or his translation works. So this thesis will study on Sun’s translation strategieson linguistic level and cultural level respectively and analyze the motivations behind thesestrategies to enrich translation theory and guide the translation practice.Pride and Prejudice is the very popular novel with Chinese readers by Jane Austen, anEnglish realistic novelist, who takes an irreplaceable position and has the honor that a writerwho is equal to Shakespeare in that time for her distinguished writing characteristics. Amongthe more than thirty translated versions of it, Wang Keyi’s (王科一）and Sun Zhili’s (孙致礼)are highly appreciated by most Chinese readers. Both of the two versions have their ownfeatures: the former is faithful, concise, and idiomatic with Chinese literary grace; the latter issmooth, accurate, coherent and clear with the exotic flavor. As for the phenomenon thatdifferent translators render different translations to the same original literary text is mainlycaused by adopting different translation strategies.This thesis will make a descriptive contrastive analysis on translation strategies andmotivations of Sun’s and Wang’s version from English to Chinese on linguistic level andfrom cultural specific on cultural level to analyze the motivations behind the differenttranslation strategies. On linguistic level, both Sun and Wang adopt almost the sametranslation strategies to be accord with the Chinese way of expression for the superficialmotivation of different languages which derives from different modes of thinking betweenEnglish native speakers and Chinese native speakers. The most difference between Englishand Chinese is hypostasis and parataxis. So there are different ways to organize theseparataxis contextual units. Those ways are affected by the system attributes of language, thethinking modes and the cultural background. As is known that because of the influence ofdifferent location, history, economy, politics, different nations and countries could form theirunique mode of thinking which can be reflected in language and influence translation. Prideand Prejudice is a literary work, and was written in the 19thcentury in Britain after theindustrial revolution, so the basic style of the translation is fixed. And the translators shouldknow the modes of thinking and standardized behaviors of the people in that times before thetranslation.On cultural level, two translators apply different translation strategies Sun wants hisreaders can feel the theme and style of the source text original exotic flavors unchanged,make every effort to achieve the spirit of the original work and reproduce a pure translationwhich is faithful not only in form but also in style. In Wang’s times, there was resistanceagainst the western culture for a time among the readers. In that period, the standard for the translation of the popular novels is that the ideal process should be embodied; the characters,actions, environments and dialogues should be presented local; the language should beconform the language habits of local people and the plot should exoteric and vivid. So lots oftranslators want to meet readers’demands and make their translations acceptable at last.Based on the above concrete analysis, the author gets that motivations for different translationstrategies on culture level are different cultural background, translation purpose and readeracceptance.Based on all these analysis, the author provides a clear picture of relationship amonglanguage, thought, culture and translation. The motivations for different translation strategiesmay be taken as the theoretic foundation of the discussion about translation strategies andguidance for theoretic researches.