A Study On Extratextual Factors In The Translation Of Zhu Rongji Meets The Press From The Perspective Of Lefevere’s Manipulation Theory

Apart from the linguistic factors, the non-linguistic factors in social-cultural contextalso play a significant role in translation, which begins to be paid attention in the last fewyears. Since1980s，in the western translation circle, Cultural School has come into beingwith the influence of post-modernism and cross-cultural research. Being different from thetext-comparison research mode of traditional philological and linguistic study, CulturalSchool stresses the power of the extratextrual elements exerted in translation, and theinfluence of translation on social culture, which give a new path to translation research. Asthe most influential branch of Cultural School, the Manipulation School points out that alltranslation owns a degree of manipulation to the source text caused by certain purpose.Andre Lefevere, the main representative of manipulation school, points out that the triadmanipulation factors, ideology, patronage and poetics are the main extratextual elements tomanipulate the production and acceptance of translated texts.As a special literary genre with strong political flavor and authority, political textindicates the country’s policy and guideline, and has the direct effect on the sovereignty andterritorial integrity of a country, the relation between countries and nations and even thedevelopment of international society as a whole. Therefore, the quality of translated politicalwritings plays the direct and influential role in the national foreign publicity. However, thecurrent studies on political translation in China are mainly confined to a matter of linguistictransfer, while largely ignore the extratextual factors in social-cultural context whichinfluence the translation.So, based on Lefevere’s manipulation theory as theoretical framework, the paper adoptsthe description and explanation study method to compare and analyze Zhu Rongji Meets thePress (hereinafter referred to as ZRMP) and its English translation, aiming to reveal theinfluential power exercised by the “invisible hand”—ideology, the “visiblehand”—patronage and poetics into the process of political translation. The ultimate target ofthe study in the paper is to place the Lefevere’s manipulation theory in the Chinesesocial-cultural surroundings so as to test its validity and applicability.The paper includes five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction which states the research motives, researchimportance, purpose, methodology and the structure of the paper.The second chapter is the literature review which goes over the previous study oftranslation of political texts and manipulation theory.The third chapter is the theoretical framework. It firstly explicates the “cultural turn” andculture study under which Lefevere advanced the manipulation theory, and then discusses the theoretical framework of the paper—the Lefevere’s manipulation theory and its triadfactors—ideology, patronage and poetics.The forth chapter is the core of the paper. It carries out a case study, through which thepaper probes into how the three factors exercise their influence and power into the translationprocess of the political writings with ZRMP as its corpus. After the systematical andpreliminary research, it’s referred that due to the features of political writings, the politicaltranslation couldn’t break away from the manipulation of social mainstream ideology; thepaper also analyzes the patronage factor in the ZRMP translation, focusing on the questionslike “who are patrons?”,“what is the structure of patron?”,“how the patron functions in thetranslation?”. After finishing the analysis and answering these questions, the paper confirmsthe great and positive efforts from patronage in ZRMP translation; meanwhile, the paperproves the inevitable influence of poetics, which is understood not only to be the conceptionproposed by Lefevere, but to be the personal aesthetical ideology of Zhu Rongji, namely hisstyle.The fifth chapter is the conclusions which make a summary of the whole paper,including the study findings, limitations and suggestions for the further research.