A Comparative Study Of The Two Chinese Versions Of The Scarlet Letter Under The Rewriting Theory

Nathaniel Hawthorne is a nineteenth century American writer, who occupies an important position in American literature. His novel The Scarlet Letter is a very important work in the history of American Literature. Up to now, translation history of the novel in China has been eighty years, and there are more than thirty Chinese versions of it, among which Shi Heng’s version and Yao Naiqiang’s version are the two representative ones. Besides, although various translation studies of the novel have been conducted, there is no systematic study from the perspective of the rewriting theory. Therefore, this thesis aims to do a comparative study of the two versions based on the rewriting theory.Rewriting theory is a systematically cultural-based theory developed by Andre Lefevere between1970s and1990s. This theory has three main ideas. First is that literary system is a part of social system and translation is a part of literary system, second is the definition of rewriting, which Lefevere thinks is the reinterpretation of a certain text. Translation is a type of rewriting. The last one is that rewriting is manipulated by ideology outside the literary system and poetics inside it. In this thesis, ideological and poetical factors are analyzed to explain the translation differences between two versions of The Scarlet Letter. The ideological background includes three aspects:political ideology, social cultural ideology and religious ideology. The poetical background also includes three aspects:the status change of translation, the development of translation theories and the changing Chinese. Differences between the two versions have been put under three aspects:the lexical choice, the syntactic difference and the structural difference. Through the study, it has been found that ideology and poetics connected to the two versions are quite different, and these differences influence the two translators on the translation of the above three aspects. First, for the lexical choice, the two versions present differences on translation of female description and religious elements. Second, on the syntactic level, word order and conjunctions in the two versions are different. Lastly, for the structure, Shi Heng omits the preface of the source text (ST), while Yao Naiqiang completely translates it into Chinese.By these findings, it can be concluded that translations under different time background have different features. Ideology and poetics not only influence translation on the lexical and syntactical level, but also on the holistic structural level. To achieve a good translation requires translators to have a great knowledge of background information, and literary works need to be retranslated after certain time, for translation in different time has different demands.