A Contrastive Study On Two Chinese Versions Of Gulliver’s Travels From The Perspective Of Rewriting Theory

Gulliver’s Travels is a splendid satirical novel which discloses the socialdarkness of the18th century Britain. The remarkable feature of the novel lies in thefact that it not only contains profound satirical spirits, but also high aesthetic values.The novel not only discloses the social conflicts and social evils in Britain, but alsolashes the excessive advocacy of rationalism, which is the source of all the socialturbulence, therefore it gains in popularity. Its theme of humanistic explorationproduces a certain influence on romanticism, and its unique writing technique whichcombines irony with humor inspires black humor writing successively, thus makingthe novel a very influential European literary work.Gulliver’s Travels was translated into Chinese in1872titled Tan Ying Xiao Lu《谈瀛小录》. The anti-colonial spirit in the novel resonated with Chinese people wholived in a semi-colonial circumstance then, which made the translated work gain ahuge success, the novel became the focus for translators too, many translators havebeen endeavored to interpret the novel from deeper perspectives and create betterversions for readers, and many new versions kept coming out. The retranslation of thisnovel can not be analyzed and explained thoroughly if some traditional prescriptivemethods are adopted, since the contents and language styles of some of those versionsare totally different from each other. The author of this thesis tries to carry out acontrastive study on two Chinese versions and analyze the underlying causes for thehuge differences between those two versions by adopting rewriting theory.Rewriting theory provides translators and scholars with a new theoreticalframework for both translation processes and translation evaluations by takingcultural factors into consideration, it is considered as a milestone in translation studies.Literary creation can not be separated from culture, although translation works are aspecial type of literary works which are created on the basis of original works, butthey are recreated in the target cultural environment and constitute a part of literaryworks of the target culture, so they must be influenced by political, economical, ethical and many other socio-cultural factors in the target culture. Inspired byrewriting theory, translators and scholars have begun to analyze translation in abroader and deeper cultural environment. Translation is not just a language transitionbetween the source language and the target language; it is a kind of rewriting of bothcontents and language forms, which is manipulated by both linguistic factors andnon-linguistic factors. Lefevere divides them into ideological constraints andpoetological constraints. Both the two constraints are dynamic systems which areevolving from generation to generation, so translators who live in different timeperiods must influenced by different ideological factors and poetological factors,which manipulates them to interpret the same source text from different perspectivesand create new versions. So the author of this thesis carries out a descriptivecontrastive analysis on two different versions that were created in different historicalperiods. The research aim is to analyze the important roles of ideological andpoetological constraints play on Gulliver’s Travels’ translations.This thesis falls into five chapters. Chapter one gives a general introduction ofthe research background, research aims, the literature review and researchmethodology. Chapter two introduces the novel’s writer, main contents and features.Chapter three states main contents and major constraints of rewriting theory, thetheoretical framework of this thesis. Chapter four analyzes the manipulation ofideological constraints on two Chinese versions of Gulliver’s Travels from threeaspects: different legal systems, political systems and social values; this chapter alsoanalyzes the poetological manipulation on two Chinese versions of Gulliver’s Travelsfrom perspectives of styles and language hybridity. Chapter five is the conclusion ofthe whole thesis.