Contextual Manipulation In Literary Translation From The Perspective Of Rewriting Theory

During the New Culture Movement era, China was at a crucial transition stage shifting from a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society to an independent modern country. This era was also a historic and vigorous period in translation theory and practice in China. In terms of medium of propagation, periodicals made a great contribution to the accomplishment of the cultural and literary revolution in this period, for most of the works, especially the translated literary ones, were first issued or serialized in the papers and magazines, and then published in a book. Therefore, in order to study the features of the translated literature in the New Culture Movement phase, the relationship between the translational activities and periodicals against the historical background should be taken into consideration. Accordingly, a thorough investigation of the translated literary texts in the journals becomes paramount to deeply and comprehensively understand the process of the literary revolution. In view of the reasons mentioned above, the dissertation takes the journals in the decade 1910-1920 or so of Republic China as study cases, treating some important representative periodicals — The Eastern Miscellany, New Youth, New Tide, and Emancipation and Reconstruction as latitude, and the time sequence and the ideological discourse as longitude. This dissertation will draw an overall description and analysis of the translational practice for the target culture and literature in the New Culture Movement period with the help of these two lines and show the significance of the translation of foreign literature in the Chinese literary history.André Lefevere initiates rewriting theory, claiming that translation is not done in a vacuum but manipulated under various social, ideological and poetic constraints and manipulation in the receiving context and environment. Rewriting theory provides a new paradigm to translation studies by enlarging the inventory of translated texts and broadening the perspectives with ideological and poetic aspects, besides the linguistic one. This research investigates and analyzes the translated literary texts in the four sample periodicals together in terms of source culture, genre, theme, and etc., and finds out that the source choices covered both powerful and weak countries, that genres were versatile and identical with the world literature, and that the major literary themes were patriotism and individualism, emphasizing on being for the sake of life, namely, the “humane literature”. Besides, the change of the literary language was a distinctive and essential reformation to bring about the literary revolution in the New Culture Movement. All these choices were not made at random, but constrained and manipulated by the dominant ideology and poetics together in a given historical context.