A Comparative Study On The Dialogue Translation Of Two Chinese Versions Of Peter Pan From The Perspective Of The Manipulation Theory

As the Scottish playwright and novelist James Barrie’s most famous work, Peter Pan enjoys a high prestige in children’s literature. Since Peter Pan was published in the form of novel in 1911, it has been translated into many languages and deeply loved by children from all over the world. In China, it also has some different versions of translation. In a novel, the dialogue is the most direct way to show the characteristics of the roles. Compared with descriptive language, as one of the important parts of children’s literature, the dialogue can more easily arouse children’s interest in reading and effectively help them understand the content of a story. After the comparison, it can be found that the dialogue translation between Liang Shiqiu’s version and Ren Rongrong’s version displays many differences in many aspects. This thesis is aimed to find out the underlying reasons for the differences.During a long time, translation studies are confined to the textual level. Until 1970 s, the “cultural turn” shifted translation studies from the textual level to the cultural level, providing a new perspective for translation studies. As one of the representatives of “cultural turn”, Belgian scholar André Lefevere states that translation is a kind of rewriting process. In the rewriting process, translator is manipulated by some factors, which can be divided into two kinds: ideology and poetics. These factors manipulate the forming process and the degree of reception of the target text.On the basis of manipulation theory, by means of literature review, comparative analysis, induction and other qualitative research methods, an analysis on how these two translators are manipulated by ideology and poetics in the rewriting process is made in this study, followed by a summary of the similarities and differences between the dialogue translation of the two Chinese versions and by the underlying reasons for the differences. The two following questions are posed in this thesis. First, in which ways can Lefevere’s manipulation theory help analyze the dialogue translation of the two versions? Second, what are the similarities and differences between the dialogue translation of the two versions and the reasons for these differences? The study reveals that both the dialogue translation of the two versions is faithful and readable. Besides, there also exist some obvious differences. The dialogue translation language of Liang’s version is relatively formal while that of Ren’s version relatively colloquial. Moreover, when dealing with some negative words, Liang tends to adopt foreignization method while Ren domestication method. Ideologically, two translators are manipulated by the mainstream views on children at their times; poetically, two translators are manipulated by their own translation principles, and all of the above reasons lead to the differences between the dialogue translation of the two versions.The significance of this research lies in the enriching of a comparative study of the dialogue translation of Peter Pan from the manipulation theory and the verification of the universal application of manipulation theory once again.