A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Gone With The Wind In Light Of Rewriting Theory

According to historical record, translation studies in West date back to ancient Rome. For quite a long time, traditional translation studies had tended to regard translation as the transformation from one language to another language. Since1970s, a group of scholars, referred to the "Translation Studies" later, have emerged in the Western translation world. Having broken through the confinement to translation studies from the purely linguistic angles, they illustrated a new aspect of translation studies from the cultural perspective. Namely, their researches have shifted from the transformation of two languages to the target language context and the relevant constrained factors, which mark the beginning of the "cultural turn" of contemporary western translation studies. The common features of Translation Studies are carrying out translation studies at cultural level, taking translated literature as a part of target language system, and adopting the mode of descriptive research.As one of the representatives of Translation Studies, Andre Lefevere put forward Rewriting Theory, which has contended that translation is a "rewriting" of an original text. In Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, Lefevere has emphasized the manipulation of the three factors of the rewriting theory, ideology, poetics and patronage, in translation. In his opinion, the "unfaithfulness" of translation tends to be influenced by the dominant ideology and poetics or the individual ideology and poetics of translators in given culture at given time, but not the result of translators’ inability.Under the background of "cultural turn" in the translation studies field, the thesis will make a comparative study on the two Chinese versions of Gone with the Wind respectively translated by Fu Donghua and Chen Liangting at different times from the perspective of Rewriting Theory, exploring that which ideology and poetics have gained the upper hand in the translation process between the dominant ideology or personal ideology and the dominant poetics and personal poetics, as well as the demonstration of their influence in the two translations. Through the comparison, it is not difficult to make a conclusion that it is static, isolated and one-sided to evaluate a translation from the mere shift of two languages between the source text and target text; cultural factors as ideology and poetics should be taken into overall consideration.This thesis falls into six parts. Chapter One is the introduction of the whole dissertation including research background, aims and significance, thesis structure and the research methodology. Besides the literature review, Chapter Two makes an outline of Gone with the Wind and its author Margaret Michelle as well as the Chinese versions. The theoretical framework of Chapter Three contains two parts that the introduction to Lefevere’s Rewriting Theory and the three elements as well as the relevance of the rewriting theory to the present study home and abroad. Chapter Four reveals the influence of ideology on translators and translations from different aspects through the analysis of the two versions. Chapter Five make a comparison of the poetological constraint’s effect on two translators and the demonstration in the two translation texts. The last chapter makes a conclusion that historical and cultural factors lead to the discrepancies of different translations, and readers at different times accepting different translation texts proves the success and the characteristics of times of different translations.