Two Periods Of Translation Activities Against The Background Of Two "revolutions" Inthe Late Qing Dynasty Andthe Early Republic Of China

Translation in China has experienced three major waves before modern China, andamong them the translation activities in the late Qing Dynasty and the Early Republic ofChina were characterized by the turbulent social condition with political movements going onone after another. Against this social background, there were two literary revolutions whichhad exerted great influence on the translation activities at that time. They were the novelrevolution initiated by Liang Qichao and the Literary Revolution promoted by Chen Duxiuand Hushi. Researches on the two revolutions and its influence on translation were scatteredin works about Chinese translation history and literary history, but so far nearly no researcheshave been done as to the contrastive study of the two revolutions and the two translatingactivities. This thesis attempts to make a contrast of similar and different influences of the tworevolutions on the two translation activities, investigate the interrelated relationship betweentranslation activities and social and literary background, and give out explanation to thesedifferences from the perspective of cultural studies.Using the historical descriptive approaches, this thesis describes the historicalbackground and development of the two literary revolutions, and their influences ontranslation activities with regard to selection of works for translation, translation principlesand strategies, as well as the impact of translated works on modern Chinese society, literatureand language. It is found that, under the influence of the two revolutions, the two translationactivities displayed the same political inclination; and both of them had greatly enrichedforms and styles of modern Chinese literature, and raised the status of the translation andtranslators in China. Meanwhile, the two translation activities showed differences or evenconflicts on such aspects as selection of works for translation and translation principles andstrategies. By further investigating on these differences and similarities from the perspectiveof cultural studies, the thesis finds that, Chinese cultural in the late Qing Dynasty and theEarly Republic of China, when confronting the western culture, had gone through a path fromrejection to absorption. In addition to this, the internal struggles between the old culturalsystem and the new one led to different tasks and purposes of the two literary revolutions, andfinally led to the differences of the two translations on selection of works for translation aswell as translation principles and strategies.