A Study On Lü Shuxiang’s Chinese Translation Of Ethan Frome: A Perspective Of Rewriting Theory

Lü Shuxiang (1904-1998), the great Chinese linguist, is the founder of thegrammar system of the modern Chinese language and C-E comparative studies. At thesame time he is also an accomplished translator whose translation career began in the1920s and most of his translation works were produced in the following20years.Ethan Frome is one of Edith Wharton’s most successful novellas that was publishedin1911. Lü Shuxiang is the first translator rendering this novella into Chinese in1947. However, compared with his works on and contributions to linguistics, histranslation works attract less attention of both the researchers and the critics.Therefore the criticism and researches on Lü’s translation are very rare.Translation was once considered as a pure process of the shift between twolanguages and the translation criteria tend to judge the translation at the linguisticlevel. But in recent years the translation scholars begin to be concerned about theexternal environment of translation. Carrying out an analysis of Lü Shuxiang’stranslation of Ethan Frome in perspective of rewriting theory proposed by AndréLefevere, this thesis endeavors to reveal how the three control factors influence thethe translator’s choice of the text and his strategies for translating it into Chinese.Apart from Introduction and Conclusion, this thesis consists of three chapters.Chapter One is the literature review covering the previous studies on Ethan Fromeand its translation. Chapter Two is the overview of the rewriting theory employed asthe theoretical framework of this study. And Chapter Three is the main part of thethesis which contains the detailed analysis of how such factors as ideology, patronageand poetics impose their influence on Lü’s translation of this novella.Influenced by the dominant social ideology, the translator transfers the foreignconcepts into the Chinese cultural-specific items, despite their different connotationsand positions in their respective cultures, so as to gain the acceptance of the readers.As for the moral issues in the text, Lü translates them as they are--a faithful strategy, and does not make any deletion, because he approves of the free love and equalrelationship between men and women. In describing the patronage influence, thisthesis digs out the social background in which the Life and Culture Press was foundedand the goals and purposes the Press founders intend to achieve at the first time. Andfinally the thesis traces back to the general development of the Chinese literary valuesfrom the New Culture Movement to the1940s to see how the poetics of each periodhas influenced the translation. As a linguist-cum-translator, Lü is very conscious tothe language phenonena in his translation and his ideas on linguistics are also givenexpressions to his translation version.Through the analysis above, the thesis finds out that although these threecontrol factors respectively have their specific influence on the translated version, theinfluence of ideology is the greatest. In Lü’s case, the poetics and patronage, to acertain degree, are subject to the social ideology.