A Historical Study To Confront Retranslation Hypothesis

Retranslation of literary classics is a fairly common phenomenon in the long history of literary translation. Through translation, in particular retranslation, literary works gain their vitality. The retranslation of Byron’s long poem "The Isles of Greece" has gone through a history of over100years from1902to2014, which demonstrates its significance in the translation history of China. Previous studies on the translation of "The Isles of Greece" mainly center on the translated versions around the New Culture Movement and exhaustive study of all its translations is lacked. What is more, there are few scholars who study it from the perspective of retranslation per se. With fifteen translations and a time span of over100years, the retranslation of "The Isles of Greece" turns out to be a perfect case study for the versification of Retranslation Hypothesis which is much neglected in most retranslation studies since most researches on retranslation focus on the motives, causes and necessity for retranslation.This thesis conducts a synchronic and diachronic stylistic analysis on the retranslations of Byron’s "The Isles of Greece" from1905to2014to further testify the validity of Retranslation Hypothesis, which in this case denotes that whether the later translations are closer to the ST in style than the previous translations. Two stylistic aspects are the research foci, including the reproduction of rhyme and meter, and verbal repetition of the original. As for the methodology, both qualitative and quantitative analyses are employed to support the research of this study. Wherein, quantitative analysis is adopted for the measurement of closeness to testify the Retranslation Hypothesis while the qualitative analysis aims to the investigation of the relationship between the target context and the translation texts and explores the influencing factors behind Retranslation Hypothesis.Through detailed investigation on all the retranslations of "The Isles of Greece" throughout three different stages, the thesis finds that the Retranslation Hypothesis gains its validity on the whole picture from the stylistic perspective. The major reasons for its validity include both ideological and poetic influences of the target culture. What should be noted that there are also counter-examples in this case study which deny RH and it has more to do with the translators’ own distinct claims and views on poetry translation. The author of this thesis hopes to make a few contributions to the studies on retranslation and add this case into the corpus of future larger studies since no single case can absolutely prove or deny the absolute validity of Retranslation Hypothesis.