| In1852, Harriet Stowe completed the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The novel was published several years before the breakout of the American Civil War. It has given a vivid description of the miserable life of a black slave named Tom, which is the major plotline of the novel. One of the major themes of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is to uncover the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery. As mentioned above, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in a specific historical period in the American history, and the fact that the novel aims to criticize the existence of slavery is of great political and social significance in the United States in the1850s. The historical and social significance embodied in Uncle Tom’s Cabin have won a place for itself as one of the most important novels in the American literatures as well as in the world literatures.Since Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, it has been translated into several languages and introduced to the whole world. In China, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the first American novel that has been translated into Chinese. The very first Chinese translated version was completed by Lin Shu and was published in1901. Lin Shu’s translation was a classical Chinese version. Five decades later, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was retranslated by Huang Jizhong. Huang Jizhong’s translation became the first vernacular Chinese version of the novel.The gap between Lin Shu’s translation and Huang Jizhong’s translation is over five decades. There is a vast difference in the social and historical background where each translated version was completed. The thesis aims to conduct a diachronic analysis of Lin Shu’s and Huang Jizhong’s translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and try to compare two versions in a descriptive way.This thesis consists of six parts. In the introduction part, the thesis introduces the novel and the historical background where Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, and explores the social and historical significance of the novel. The research questions have also been put forward in the introduction part. In Chapter One, the thesis gives a detailed exploration of the three theoretical points that have been used in the comparative analysis of the two translated versions, i.e. retranslation, norms and paratext. In Chapter Two, through an exploration of the respective paratextual material of Lin Shu’s and Huang Jizhong’s translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the thesis tries to analyze the connection between each version and their respective social and historical background and further to discuss the influence of historical changes on translation in a diachronic way. In Chapter Three and Chapter Four, based on the discussion of the social and historical background where each translated version was completed, the thesis aims to analyze the differences between Lin Shu’s and Huang Jizhong’s translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the following two perspectives, i.e. why the two translated versions have used different types of Chinese in the translations and why the two translated versions have shown large differences in the level of faithfulness to the original novel. The argument in the field of norms will shed light on the exploration of the above two questions. Also, the dynamic shift of translation norms along with the social and historical changes is expected to be demonstrated from the above analysis. In the conclusion part, the thesis arrives at the conclusion that the translation and retranslation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in China from the late Qing Dynasty to1950s can be partially explained by the translation hypothesis, which is the general principle to explain retranslation phenomena, but such translation and retranslation practices are also closely related to the specific social and historical background where each translated text appeared. What’s more, translation norms have shifted with the changes in the social and historical contexts, and such shift will influence the specific translation practices of two selected Chinese versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. |
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