A Study Of The English Translation Of To Live By Yu Hua

The reception and transmission of translated literature from the perspective of sociology has intimate relationship with the transmission mechanism of the translation work in the society. This paper, based on academic literature as reference proposes a new concept the web transmission mechanism that specifically applies to the translated literature. It states that with the precondition of the text translation quality, and the reception and transmission involves many a transmission stratum, the united influences exercised from the previous stratum to the posterior stratum and the united washback vice versa is actually a matter of converging different people from various social background within a short time which can construct an invisible social web from different social institution, and eventually exerts impacts on the reception and recognition of the translation work in the target culture, and even more translation of the original author’s works.This paper takes To Live written by Yu Hua as a case study. Yu Hua(1960-)is one representative writer of Chinese mechanism literature and most of his works have been translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean and Japanese. Relatively, there are few Chinese contemporary works that can extend their literary life in the target culture and scarcely the works written by one author can be honored by more than one foreign literary prizes, but it fortunately descends upon the translation of Yu Hua’s works such as Italy’s Premio Grinzane Cavour(1998)、James Joyce Foundation Award(2002), and particularly it is the first time for one Chinese author to win the James Joyce Foundation Award. By surveying the reception of the different translation versions of his different works, To Live is found to be the most influential one. Why this novel can accomplish much more than other Chinese literatures that are viewed as the classical ones in Chinese literary system after being transferred into the foreign culture? This paper works briefly on the thematic and narrative features of Yu Hua’s works and then shifts to the external analysis of the related social translation activities from the new concept of the web transmission mechanism.Chapter One begins with the background of the present study, the purpose and the structure of the thesis. Chapter Two introduces the literary achievement of Yu Hua and related academic literature on him and the connection between translation and social transmission and related literature. Chapter Three proposes the new concept "web transmission mechanism" for translation literature, and points out the basic elements, primary characteristics, the fundamental condition of the construction and its applicability. Chapter Four deals with the analytical study of To Live and then employs the web transmission mechanism to make the description and analysis about the social translation activities around the translation work. The analytical description will be given from three aspects, the literary characteristics of the source text, the construction of the web for the translation work and the repercussion caused by the construction of the web transmission mechanism, among which priority is given to the construction of its web transmission mechanism including the influences from previous stratum to the posterior stratum and vice versa. Chapter Five conclusively points out that the construction of WTM for translation work should be valued for the dissemination of the Chinese literature overseas, and finally states the shortcomings and the suggestions for further studies.