Misreading And Mistranslation In Literature Translation From The Perspective Of Ideology: Exemplified With Bing Xin’s Translation Of Tagore’s Gitanjali

Rabindranath Tagore, a world-renowned Indian (Bengali) poet, writer, artist and social activist, is the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali (also known as Song Offerings) in English. Full of love, beauty and philosophic thoughts, this collection of religious lyrics aroused the concern of many translators. Bing Xin, a famous Chinese poet, modern writer, translator, writer of children’s literature, social activist and essayist, ever translated Gitanjiali, which has been highly thought of and regarded as the classic for the fresh and elegant language.Andre Lefevere, one of the representatives in promoting cultural turn in translation study, deems that the three factors:ideology, poetics and patronage, have profound influence on translators, which decide the selection of translation texts, translation strategy and translation purpose. "Ideology" in Lefevere’s mind "dictates basic strategy the translator is going to use and therefore also dictates solutions to problems concerned with both the ’universe of discourse’expressed in the original (objects, concepts, customs belonging to the world that was familiar to the writer of the original) and the language the original itself is expressed".Based on the ideology of Lefevere’s manipulation theory, this paper examines the misreading and mistranslation in Bing Xin’s translation of Tagore’s poems Gitanjiali from two perspectives:intentional mistranslation and unintentional mistranslation by probing into Bing Xin’s and Tagore’s social backgrounds and educational backgrounds. The following three questions will be answered in the thesis:(A) How social ideology and individual ideology influence translator’s translation? (B) The relationship between misreading, mistranslation and translation. (C) Are the mistranslation in Bing Xin’s translation acceptable? It is the creative translation in her translation that impresses the readers and bring them aesthetic experience.In this paper, qualitative research methods are adopted to compare Tagore’s English version of Gitanjali and the Chinese version by Bing Xin after comparatively analyzing the social background and educational background of Tagore and_Bing Xin. Studies show that different social backgrounds and educational backgrounds of Tagore and Bing Xin are main factors resulting in different ideologies, which account for misunderstanding and mistranslation. Different ideology influences the translator’s misunderstanding and mistranslation, which are quite common in literary translation. Some mistranslation is intentionally creative translation which could impress readers in a special manner.Due to the lack of knowledge about Bengali, the author of this paper can not conduct a comparative study of the Bengali version of Gitanjali with the English version, thus failing to verify whether there exists mistranslation in the English version. If it does, misreading and mistranslation occurring in Bing Xin’s translation process are understandable.