| During the May4th Movement, translation activity reached a new height in China with the spread of new cultural thoughts. Most of the scholars at that time played the dual role of an original writer and a passionate translator. Pushed by the dire need of overthrowing the old Chinese culture and literature, as well as the need of setting up Chinese new culture and literature, scholars turned their eyes to literature in countries like Britain, France, the United States, and Russia after its October Revolution, and such "week and small" countries sharing similar situation with China as Hungary and Ireland to seek for solution, while the Chinese traditional literature failed to realized this goal through reform. Thus, translation literature became a bridge between literary art and the personal political ideals.Mao Dun (Shen Yanbing), a representative of the scholars both as a writer and a translator in the May4th Movement, actively advocated the development of China’s new literature and was devoted to the New Cultural Movement as a firm promoters and practitioners. From1916, Mao Dun began to publish his translations focusing on the literary works of the weak nations’in the world with the faithfulness to the original as his translation criterion. Based on such publications as the Fiction Monthly journal, Mao Dun published a series of translation works and some personal opinions on translation, distinguishing himself as a well-known translator and translation theorist of his time.Under Andre Lefevere’s Manipulation Theory and Gabriel A. Almond’s concept of "Political Culture", this thesis discusses how the Political Culture concept influences the translation literature during the May4th Movement based on Mao Dun’s early translations, in view of the requirements inside the literature category, from the patron’s ideology to the decisions made by translator’s ideology. to illustrate how the political culture operated in the literary translation during the May4th Movement.This thesis first introduces the enthusiastic phenomenon of literary translation during the May4th Movement as follows:scholars all actively devoted themselves into translation; the quantity and quality of translated works reached an unprecedented level; the market for translated works prospered; translation theories sprang up with contending for attention. The thesis points out that these phenomena reflected the political culture stimulated literature and art. Then the introduction of the Polysystem Theory and Manipulation Theory as well as the concept of "political culture" paves way for the demonstration of relation between translation and political culture. After that, the thesis analyzes the main features of Mao Dun’s translation during a decade from1917to1927:the principle of "Faithfulness" as the focus in translation, and the strategy of adherence to the original words and sentence structures. It is acknowledged from these features that Mao Dun’s cultural identity was in consistent with that of the mainstream of the society.On the basis of the previous three chapters, the thesis finally studies the influences of political culture upon Mao Dun’s literary translation from the aspects of ideology, poetics and patronage. Ideologically, the influence reflects on Mao Dun’s translation principles:Mao held that translation was for certain social purpose, and his translation was a result of the co-influence of different ideologies produced by combination of "soul" and "form". Poetically, the selection of originals and the language used in the target texts revealed Mao’s political-oriented stance. For patronage, Fiction Monthly and Literature Weekly are selected as two important publications that have exerted great impact on Mao’s translation decision. The publications required agreement with the translators on the aims and themes of translated works, as well as the balance between popular acceptance and the artistic percipient of the target texts. |
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