An Ideological Approach To Translations Of Gulliver’s Travels In China

Gulliver’s Travels, written by the British writer Jonathan Swift, is generallyconsidered a masterpiece of satire. However, due to the different cultural backgroundsand ideologies, a number of Chinese translations more or less differed from theoriginal text. Moreover, many Chinese readers mistakenly believe that Gulliver’sTravels is a novel for children. This paper attempts to make a comprehensive andhistorical summary of the Chinese translations of Gulliver’s Travels. At the same time,by employing the French philosopher Louis Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatustheory and the representative of the cultural translation studies André Lefevere’sRewriting theory as the theoretical basis, the author tries to put translation of thenovel into the macro social context while exploring the ideological background of thedifferent translations in different periods and making text analysis as well ascomparative analysis of different translations to probe into two questions:(1) to verifythat the ideology indeed has some connection with the translation activities;(2) howdoes this connection reflect in the text of translations?This thesis is divided into seven parts. The first part is an introduction of theresearch background, literatures, purpose and methods; the first chapter generallyintroduces the Gulliver’s Travels and the Chinese translations of it. In Chapter2,combining Althusser’s ideological theory and Lefevere’s Rewriting theory, the authordiscusses and defines ideology; in the next three chapters, translation of Gulliver’sTravels in China is divided into three periods, in which the author sums up thecharacteristics of the ideology background and the translations respectively, with thetext analysis of several translations. In the final part of conclusion, the author attemptsto review the previous discussion and makes a summary of inadequacy of the thesis. The thesis is a positive attempt of borrowing the western philosophy andtranslation theory to explain the phenomenon of the translation in China. What ismore, the author hopes the thesis can provide a new perspective of solving theproblems which cannot be solved by the traditional translation studies.