The Role Of Translation With Baihuawen During The May4th Movement In The Development Of Modern Chinese

This thesis provides a description of the relations between the translation activities and thebaihuawen movement during the May4thperiod. The materials for the present study come fromarguments on translation criteria and the baihuawen movement published in the La Jeunesse andThe Renaissance.The baihuawen movement during the May4thperiod plays an important role in thedevelopment of modern Chinese. At that time, many translators used baihuawen in translations;scholars like Liu Bannong and Fu Sinian held the idea that baihuawen could overcome itsdefects by borrowing new vocabulary and grammars from western languages. As a result,baihuawen used in that period had some features characteristic of European languages, whichhas been described in works of Wang Li, Lü Shuxiang and Wang Kefei. However, the reasons ofthis phenomenon received little discussion. This thesis puts emphasis on the description ofscholars’ expectations towards translation activities during the May4thmovement, thus therelations between translation activities and the development of modern Chinese are revealed.As influential magazines during the May4thperiod, La Jeunesse and The Renaissanceprovided great stages for the baihuawen movement. The two magazines faithfully recorded alarge amount of materials about the arguments on the baihuawen movement and scholars’expectations for translation. The findings made in the study are listed below:First, during the May4thmovement, many translators expected to improve Chineselanguage by borrowing new materials from western languages. On the one hand, they set modelsfor baihuawen and the baihuawen literature by means of “literal” translation method; on theother hand, they borrowed new vocabulary and sentence structures from western languages withthe purposes of enriching the expressive power of baihuawen.Second, as scholars expected, translation activities during this period contributed to thedevelopment of modern Chinese in four aspects. The first one, it enlarged vocabulary ofbaihuawen; the second one, the varieties of flexible sentence structures enriched the expressivepower of baihuawen; the third one, with a great amount of literature translations as the models,the traditional literary genres were innovated and accepted by the public, which, in return, helpedthe baihuawen consolidate its social status; the last one, the paragraph forms and newpunctuation system were adopted in the baihuawen literature.Third, the baihuawen during this period was considered as an “elite” language which wasdifficult to be promoted to the public. Therefore, a discussion on the “public language” began in1930s, which aimed to remove the “elite” factors in baihuawen.The meaning and significance of the thesis lies in that through the analysis of materials on La Jeunesse and The Renaissance, the author provides a full view of translation activities and thebaihuawen movement, thus the motive of translation activity and its role in the baihuawenmovement are emerging.