A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of A Storm Of Swords From The Perspective Of Post-Colonial Studies

The famous announcement of "cultural turn" in translation studies was announced in the year of 1990 by Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere, two of the most outstanding translation studies critics. They presumed that "neither the word, nor the text, but the culture becomes the operational ’unit’ of translation"(Lefevere and Bassnett 1990:8). This idea raised by Bassnett and Lefevere was called as the "real breakthrough for the field of translation studies" (Edwin Gentzler 1998:xi), which is right because since then the study of translation did enter a new age.This cultural turn has affected translation studies in many ways since the year of 1990, including the setting of a new relationship between cultural studies and translation studies, which leads critical attention to globalization and national identities. In the past few years, all these new forces and the deepening of post-colonial studies in literature caused the cultural turn in translation studies. From the single culture to intercultures and multicultures, the translation studies have now been out of the purely linguistic round and entered the cultural round, or the post-colonial round.Post-colonial studies are a theory which analyzes the history, culture, literature and modes of discourse that are specific to the former colonies of England, Spain France and other European imperial powers. These studies focus especially on the third world countries in Africa, Asia and SouthAmerica. Post-colonial translation studies are a series of conceptions, judgments and discourse created in the context of post-colonial studies. What post-colonial translation studies notice is how the power of discourse works in the colonizing progress and the following history of resistance, acceptance and elimination. The combination of post-colonial studies and translation theory made directly the cultural turn of translation studies, brought the studies of translation from linguistic to cultural direction, which pays more attention to the functions of politics, culture, power and ideology towards translation.A Song of Ice and Fire:A Storm of Sword is a popular fantasy written by G.G Martin, and has been translated into 45 different languages. This paper is going to analyze two different translation versions of this novel, a representative of mass culture, and introduce to readers the reason why mass culture has the value to be studied.Taiwanese literature is a branch of Chinese literature, but there appeared lots of differences between Taiwanese literature and literature on mainland because of the long-term colonized history of Taiwan. Sixty years of colonization by Japan brought deep traumas on Taiwanese culture and literature, causing the colonized language like a tattoo that cannot be eliminated. This paper is going to analyze Taiwanese version and Chinese version of A Song of Ice and Fire:A Storm of Swords from a post-colonial perspective, and try to find out the different strategies the translators used and the reason behind their choice.