A Diachronic Comparison On Manipulation Theory Manipulating Three Translators Of Lolita

The English writer Green Graham wrote book reviews in The Times and regarded it asone of the three masterpieces in1995after reading Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Thus he helped topopularize this book and made it a worldwide best-seller. So far, Lolita has been translatedinto various languages. In China there are nearly20Chinese versions of Lolita. But indifferent eras, different translators have rewritten Lolita to a large extent in order to maketheir translations of it in line with China’s national conditions and acceptable to Chinesereaders in different times. And these rewritings are inextricably linked with ideology, poeticsand patron in different eras. But what are the differences among the three translations in threedifferent eras? What factors impact the differences among the three translations in threedifferent eras? How ideology, poetics and patronage exactly manipulated the translators? Thisthesis aims to discuss these issues based on the “Three Factors” of Lefevere’s ManipulationTheory.In the1980s Lefevere’s Manipulation Theory creatively analyzed some factors involvedin the translation process, such as ideology, poetics and patronage, thus he was considered asa representative figure of the manipulation school. In the90s, he proposed the culturalresearch in translation studies, which subverted the past translation theories and contributed tothe “cultural turn” in translation studies. Lefevere presented the “Three Factors”, namely,poetics, ideology and patronage in his book Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation ofLiterature Fame. From his point of view, translation can only be a rewrite of the original andcan never be a true reflection of it because translators and their work are always manipulatedby these three factors.The innovation of this thesis is to select three Chinese versions of Lolita that have beenpublished in the three decades since the implementation of the policy of reform and openingup to the outside world including the first mainland version translated by Huang Jianren in1989, the most popular one by Yu Xiaodan in1997and the one regarded as the firstcover-to-cover Chinese translation by Zhu Wan in2005and to have a comparative study onthe three factors manipulating the three translators of Lolita in three different decades.Finally this thesis comes to the conclusion that the three translators are all manipulatedby the ideology, poetics and patronage in their own times before and during their translationprocess. Ideology manipulates their selections of the source text and the correspondingstrategies. Moreover, social ideology, as an important part of ideology, manipulated thetranslators from different aspects such as era background, social culture and ethic and politics. Poetics, as a standard of social literature, manipulated the translators at different levelsincluding the syntactic level, the level of language style and sexual scene description whilepatrons manipulated the publication and issue of the translation through the ideological,economic and social status components. This thesis shows that when different translatorstranslate the same work in different eras, their translation behavior must be manipulated bythe ideology, poetics and patronage in their own times. This thesis provides an effectiveexample for future employment of the Manipulation Theory from the diachronic perspectivein the comparative study on multiple translations in translating the same work in differenteras.