Translation Variation Methods In Lin Shu’s Translation Of David Copperfield And Their Motivations

Lin Shu is a well-known translator in the translation field in China. All his life, he translated more than180books. His translation Kuai Rou Yu Sheng Shu (《块肉余生述》) is very similar to the original text David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, and it is regarded as a classic translation in Lin’s translated novels. As is known to all, Lin Shu didn’t know English. Therefore, he was confined to this and his cooperative interpreters affected his translation quality. But because of this, he was less restricted by the original text and was not likely to rigidly adhere to a word or a sentence in the original. Instead, he attentively figured out the original writer’s intention through the interpreter’s narration. Lin Shu could grasp the character and story in the novel from a global perspective, and then built up an empathetic relationship with the original author. Just as he said,"Although I cannot speak English,1can distinguish the school to which the source text belong through the interpreter as well as I can tell the difference of my family members’footsteps."(1980:1)Lin’s translation seems very free in that he is not faithful to the original author and uses amplification, omission, combination, division, replacement, alteration, and other kinds of transfer operations. His special translation operations fall into the scope of the translation variation theory which was first systematically formulated by Professor Huang Zhonglian in the late1990s. This theory mainly deals with the categories of translation which are quite different from the so-called full translation which is held by traditional scholars. It studies the forms, methods, and functions of special types of translating, such as selective translation, edited translation, condensed translation, review, translation and comment, and so on.As for the reasons why Lin Shu employed methods of translation variation, it seems that we can resort to the relevant translation theory proposed by Andre Lefevere. As one of the key representatives of the Manipulation School, Lefevere has formulated his poetic theory which is one of the significant achievements in translation studies. He states that society is a super-system, or the environment of a literary system, whereas literature is one of the subsystems, or a system of systems. These systems interact with and exert impact on each other. Rewriting is one of the means by which the survival of literary works is ensured. He puts great emphasis on the role of three control factors in the process of translation:inside the literary system are ideology and poetics, and outside the system is patronage. Translators adapt and manipulate the originals to make them fit in with the dominant ideological, poetical present and the needs of patrons.The thesis is to conduct some research into Lin Shu’s Kuai Rou Yu Sheng Shu from the perspective of Lefevere’s poetic theory, aiming at interpreting how cultural context manipulates the process of literary translation in the late Qing dynasty. including the choice of source texts and translation strategies. In the light of the poetic theory, the thesis puts into the wider social context the famous translator Lin Shu and analyzes the factors which influence his translation strategies. Through the present study, we have found that if we compare the original and Lin Shu’s Chinese version of David Copperfield lexically, some parts of the target text can be labeled as mistranslations. However, when we put the translation under a broader cultural context, they are translated in their own ways for reasons which are quite logical and acceptable. By exploring the underlying reasons in Lin Shu’s translation of Western literature under the control of Chinese social culture and poetics, the author of this thesis hopes that more attention should be paid to the research on cultural and poetic factors in the process of translation studies.Translation is a kind of transformation between languages as well as a kind of communication between cultures. Therefore, it will inevitably be restricted by socio-cultural norms. with no exception of Lin Shu’s translation. This thesis will choose Chapter10of the novel to do a case study. Using comparative and descriptive methods from the angle of the translation variation theory the thesis explores and summarizes the translation variation methods used in Kuai Rou Yu Sheng Shu. Then, referring to Lefevere’s poetics, it analyzes and discusses the deep-level socio-cultural reasons for the translation variation methods employed by Lin Shu in his rendering of David Copperfield, proving that Lin’s translation is not a kind of distorted translation but a rational and inevitable outcome produced by the socio-cultural factors of the day.This paper is divided into five parts, including the Introduction part and the Conclusion part. The first chapter is an introduction to the study. It introduces the research objectives, research significance, research problems, research methods and structural arrangement of the thesis. The second chapter reviews the previous research related to the topic. It gives us the literature review about the research of Lin Shu’s translated novels and the research on Kuai Rou Yu Sheng Shu at home and abroad.The third chapter is about the theoretical framework of the thesis. In this chapter the author of the thesis presents the development and background of the translation variation theory and Lefevere’s translation theory, as well as a combination of Lefevere’s poetic theory and strategies of translation variation. The fourth chapter is the case study which deals with the translation methods in Kuai Rou Yu Sheng Shu translated by Lin Shu and the poetic and cultural influence on the translator in use of the methods. The fifth chapter is the conclusion of the thesis.