A Cultural Study On The Variations In My Life As Emperor

Su Tong’s writing has gained him a considerable audience-not only in China,but also overseas. His novel Wo De Di Wang Sheng Ya(My Life as Emperor)wastranslated by the famous American sinologist Professor Howard Goldblatt in2005,however, little attention and study have been given to its English version after itspublication. Literary translation as an efficient way to spread our culture to the westdeserves our attention and study. Therefore, based on postcolonial translation theory,this thesis takes Wo De Di Wang Sheng Ya as a case study to do a tentative study onthe variations of cultural elements in the translation from Chinese into English.After a close analysis of the English version, the author finds out that variationsoccurred in the English version. And these variations are related with the translator’scultural background. This thesis takes postcolonial translation theory as its theoreticalbase to explore the cultural reasons for these variations. Firstly, the translator isinfluenced by American poetics and ideology and caters to the potential readers, andthus the original text undergoes variations. Secondly, due to the influence of Americanculture and cultural filter the translator is bound to misread the original text whentranslating a foreign text. And this leads to variations to some extent. Therefore, it canbe concluded that information distortion will absolutely occur when a literature text is“travelling” to a foreign country; translation is manipulated under the influence of theideology and poetics in the target culture. Therefore, based on the above discussion, itcan be safely concluded that in the context of post-colonialism, translation isdefinitely restricted by culture, which easily leads to the variations in the translation.The research value and contributions of this thesis lie in the following threeaspects: first, based on postcolonial translation theory and western culture-orientedtranslation theory, this is the first thesis that adopts a textual analysis research methodto discuss variations in the process of translation of Wo De Di Wang Sheng Ya. Second,the author hopes this thesis will enrich the text-centered research of the literarytranslation. Third, it is of great significance to promote the study of the English version of Su Tong’s Wo De Di Wang Sheng Ya.