A Comparative Study On The Translation Of Luotuo Xiangzi By Evan King And Shi Xiaojing From The Perspective Of Translational Poetics

In the late 20th century, Manipulation opens up a new vista for translation study, which leads researchers to pay more attention to several external factors such as history, culture, political ideology and poetics norms. The Manipulation School, represented by Andre Lefevere, is an important branch under cultural studies.Manipulation theory was proposed by Andre Lefevere, who held the points that literature translation was mainly manipulated by three factors, namely, ideology, poetics and patronage. Many researches focused on ideology, while relatively few researches studied from the angle of poetics. In the book Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, Lefevere put forward that poetics contains two components:one is the inventory of literary devices, genres, motifs, prototypical characters and symbols; the other is the social function of literature. It can be seen that the manipulation on literary translation mainly manifest on two levels:(1) manipulation within the text, that is, translation strategy, translation language, expressive skills; (2) manipulation beyond the text, that is, the selection of translated text and the purpose of translation.Lao She is one of the best-known modern novelists in China. Luotuo Xiangzi, one of his representative works, is a realistic novel, which accurately mirrors the thoughts of the urban poor in the late 1920s and profoundly exposes the darkness and unfairness at that time. This novel has been well-received since its publication, not only arousing the interest of the Chinese people, but also being translated into other languages. So far the number of its translation is up to thirty-eight versions.Based on Lefevere’s Manipulation Theory, this thesis aims to make comparison of Evan King’s and Shi Xiaojing’s versions in order to explore how translational poetics manipulate the adoption of translation strategies. This thesis is composed of six parts, including the introduction and conclusion. The introduction presents the research questions, significance of the research and methodology. The second and third chapters respectively introduce the literature review and theoretical framework. The fourth and fifth chapters are the body of this thesis. The fourth chapter conducts a detailed analysis of manipulations beyond the text to probe into the influence of dominant poetics and individual poetics on the selection of text and the reception of readers. The fifth chapter concentrates on the exploration of manipulation from the text level. The author discusses the poetological manipulation on three levels, that is, the lexical level, the syntactical level, and the discourse level. Finally, the author concluded that as the two translators have different translational poetics in the process of translation, Evan King mainly adopted foreignization while Shi Xiaojing tended to use domestication. By a relatively detailed analysis and comparison, the author made an objective description of the two versions from the light of poetics, with the intention to analyze the rationality of the two versions. It can be drawn from this study that it is the interaction between the dominant poetics in different times and translator’s individual poetics that results in their quite different versions.