A Study On Two Chinese Versions Of Peter Pan From The Perspective Of Translation Ethics

In recent years, translation ethics has become a hot topic in translation studies and it arouses more and more attention from the scholars both at home and abroad. Andrew Chesterman puts forward the theory of five translation ethics models, which causes a great sensation in academia. Translation of children’s literature is an indispensable part of literary translation. However, due to the fact that children’s literature stays in a peripheral position in literary polysystem, it has long been neglected and undervalued, and relevant translation studies are quite sparse. Therefore, there is an urgent need of in-depth researches on this special field. The novel Peter Pan is the masterpiece of J. M. Barrie, a British writer, playwright and essayist. It is also one of the most influential children’s literature works in Great Britain. Based on Andrew Chesterman’s theory of five translation ethics models, this thesis makes a comparative study on Yang Jingyuan’s and Ren Rongrong’s versions of Peter Pan to probe into the embodiments and violations of ethics of representation and ethics of communication.The research shows that in the process of translation, the two translators do not follow the models from the very begining to the end. Some Chinese readers, especially the young readers can hardly understand part of the novel if they always keep the rules, therefore, they sometimes break the models. Meanwhile, it happens that they sometimes violate the models, misleading the Chinese readers because of their own understandings and limitations of the cultural background knowledge of the original language. Therefore, the author points out that the ambiguity of the choice of the translation ethics models is inevitable, so translators have to strategically make decisions to follow or break the model(s).