Dancing With Shackles

The title of this thesis is A Study of Cultural Translation of Fortress Besieged.This thesis attempts to make a study of Fortress Besieged from the macro level(including ideology, poetics, Universe of Discourse) to the micro level (includingdiction, sentence structure and paragraph cohesion), with the intention to find out howthe translators move beyond the above constraints and whether the translationconveys the source language and culture to target readers to the fullest.Some studies have been so far conducted on the English version of the novelfrom the perspective of cultural translation. However, most of them focus on theapplication of foreignization and domestication. Those that combine the translationwith ideology, poetics, Universe of Discourse—the three factors of cultural translationare limited. The choice of translation strategy reflects not only the outer constraints,but also the translator’s attitude toward culture and translating. An in-depth study onFortress Besieged from such aspects as ideology, poetics, and Universe of Discourseis instrumental in guiding the future translation activities and promoting acculturation.Furthermore, the examples in the thesis are all original and representative, whichinvolve scenery description, monetary unit, hybrid language, religion, physiognomy,the five-element theory, idioms and proverbs, literature images, etc. They well serveas suitable examples for analyzing and studying ideology, poetics, and Universe ofDiscourse on linguistic level and on cultural level.Such methods as induction, deduction, qualitative method will be adopted in thisthesis to study the cultural effect of the English version on target readers. Theintroduction part will study the style of Fortress Besieged in such aspects as languageand culture, introduce cultural translation school and its main thoughts, and attempt toreach the conclusion that studying Fortress Besieged from the perspective of cultural translation is not only appropriate but also meaningful. Chapter one will make areview of the study of Fortress Besieged and its English version at home and abroad,and try to arrive at the conclusion that studies of Fortress Besieged from such aspectsas ideology, poetics and Universe of Discourse are only a few. Chapter two to chapterfour is the main body, which will study Fortress Besieged from ideology, poetics andUniverse of Discourse respectively. Each chapter will start with a quotation fromcultural translation theory, followed by a text analysis on the micro level. Then thethesis will probe into the ideology, poetics and Universe of Discourse that thetranslation reveals, identify translation strategies, analyze the translators’ intention orpurpose, and study the impact of the translation on target readers. In the conclusionpart, this thesis will sum up the main thoughts of cultural translation school, researchmethods, constraints that the translators are confined by and arrive at threeconclusions: Firstly, in the transferring of shared occurrences such as scenerydepiction, universal ideas, hybrid language phenomenon, the translators either retainthe already innovative expressions in the source text or give their creativity andimagination to full play and rewrite the content in target readers’ way of thinking,aiming to achieve social, historical and cultural exchange; Secondly, translatorscompete with the original author implicitly or explicitly within the constraints ofideology, poetics and Universe of Discourse; Finally, in the transferring of missingelements, such as literature image, philosophy, the five-element theory, etc. thetranslators, on the one hand, make target readers approach the source culture byretaining cultural elements in the source text. On the other hand, they take targetreaders’ acceptance into full consideration. Minor changes, such as the adding ofexclamation marks, replacing, omitting, and coinage, are widely scattered in thetranslation as a way to disseminate Chinese culture in the Western world and enrichtarget culture at the same time.The translators of Fortress Besieged attach great importance to the transferringof language and culture. Though there exist all kinds of constraints on both macrolevel and micro level, the two translators shuttle between the two Universes ofDiscourse—Western culture and Chinese culture, and show their talents and skills in limited space. Just like two dancers with shackles, they successfully arouse thedesired feelings among target readers on the whole.