A Study Of The Golden Cangue From The Perspective Of Manipulation

Eileen Chang plays an important role in Chinese modern literature. As a writer, she has produced a considerable number of works during her lifetime. These works fall into different literary genres, including novels, essays, plays and so on. The representative ones of them are Jin Suoji, Love in a Fallen City and Fate of Half a Life. Among these works, Jin Suoji has a special significance. On one hand, it has attracted the attention of many readers, even some famous scholars gave a high compliment to this work, such as Fu Lei and C.T.Hisa. This helped the establishment of Chang’s literary status; on the other hand, Chang herself has translated the work into English for totally three times, which reveals how much she valued this work herself. Therefore, it is worth conducting a research on it.This thesis concentrates on the study of the English translation of this work. As mentioned above, this work has been translated for totally three times, which results in three English versions of the same work. In this study, great importance would be attached to the last version, The Golden Cangue. Through the investigation of it, the author found that it remained as faithful as the original work at linguistic level. However confusingly, through the exploration of many relevant treatises, it is found that the readers’ reception of them are different: the former has even not been understood by foreign readers while the latter was once a best-selling one. In order to find the reasons behind, the author studies The Golden Cangue from the cultural perspective.Andre Lefevere’s Manipulation Theory would been employed to explore and investigate the cultural factors that have influenced the translation, and the way in which they expressed themselves in the work. Through the investigation of the social and cultural background, the author found that the manipulative factors had exerted great influence on the translation, both on the translation process and translation product.. Firstly the dominant ideology in the target culture then has affected the publication and reception of the work; secondly the peotics at that time, especially feminist translation also exhibited its effect on the text; finally the patron, C.T.Hisa motivated the translation and the purpose of him led the translator adopt foreignization as the main translation strategy. To sum up, cultural factors at different levels, especially the dominant ideology in target culture and the purpose of patron had a negative effect on the reception of the translation. These two factors are just the reasons why The Golden Cangue was not well accepted in America.