On Cultural Transplantation In Literary Translation From The Perspective Of The Manipulation Theory

The emergence of "cultural turn" in the1970s brought the traditional translation theories the completely brand-new horizon and made translation successfully shift from the linguistic and textual perspective to the cultural perspective, and Lefevere and other representatives of manipulation school emphasized the great influence of ideology and poetics on literary translation. On the one hand, as Updike’s representative work, Rabbit Is Rich which won three great awards is reputed to be "American society’s dynastic history" and contains almost all kinds of social cultural elements. On the other hand, it was after1978that Updike and his works were introduced into China formally, with the progress of China’s reform and opening-up, we can see that domestic acceptance about Updike and Rabbit Is Rich goes along with China’s modern social transition, and shows different characteristics at different stage. Based on the above, this study employs two Chinese versions of Rabbit Is Rich which are1990version of Zhang Renjian’s and2008version of Su Fuzhong’s as the research sample of manipulation of ideology and poetics to literary translation and tries to investigate the reasons behind its acceptance.From the general survey of studies on Rabbit Series over the past30years, it can be seen that all of these studies took it as foreign literature work and studied it from sociological, philosophical or other perspectives, but ignored that it is also a translated literature in China, and there is few research on Rabbit Is Rich from translation theories perspective. Therefore, this study, in light of manipulation theory, tries to compare the degree of cultural transplantation in two different versions and explore the relationship between cultural transplantation and ideology and poetics.Through the contrastive study, it can be found out:firstly, even though in the same historical period, the ideology and poetics of different stages still manipulate translation; secondly, the degree of cultural transplantation in literary translation depends on the social ideology and poetics in which the translated text is written; last, compared with other types of text, cultural transplantation of literary translation is affected by ideology and poetics in a larger extent.All together there are seven chapters in this thesis. The first chapter introduces the research background, aims and significance and layout of the thesis. Chapter two witnesses the literature review and consists of three parts:the first is on the application of manipulation theory to translation studies, the second is on literary translation and cultural transplantation, while the third is a bird view of Rabbit Series and Rabbit Is Rich, consisting of a brief introduction and previous studies of Rabbit Series and Rabbit Is Rich, and a short description of cultural elements in this novel. Chapter three covers the theoretical framework, a detailed explanation of the theoretical medium-anipulation theory. Chapter four is the research design consisting of research questions, research methods, data collection and data analysis. Chapter five and Chapter six are the main bodies of this research, Chapter five is the comparison of the cultural elements in two Chinese versions of Rabbit Is Rich from material aspect, system aspect and psychological aspect, on the basis of H. H. Stern’s cultural classification. Chapter six, according to manipulation theory, aims to analyze and figure out the different degree of cultural transplantation between the two versions from the ideology and poetics perspective. Chapter seven is the conclusion of the whole research, covering major conclusions and limitations of the research.