The Influences Of Fields And Their Capital Situations On Translator's Habitus

Translator's habitus is a significant perspective of translation sociology. Previous studies on translator's habitus, however, mainly focus on the analysis and description of a translator's individual history, lacking of discussions on his/her collective history where he/she is imbedded. Actually, in Bourdieu's theory of habitus, the habitus of an agent derives from both individual and collective history. Therefore, this thesis tries to probe into the influences of fields and their capital situations on translator's habitus by applying Bourdieu's theory of practice and using the Fu She Chinese translation of Red Star over China(SFV) as a case.FSV is the first complete Chinese translation of Red Star over China, therefore it is of highly historical significance. The background of FSV is the Anti-Japanese war setting where the political factors of translation stood out. In terms of the content of FSV, it is a foreigner's reportage of China's affairs, which makes it bear a lot of crosscultural characteristics. In addition, FSV is produced by a group of translators and their division of labor is not clear. All these factors make meaningless the description of an individual translator's history, but provide a typical case for the investigation on the collective history and its influences on translator's habitus.Therefore, this thesis proposes a hypothesis: the translator's habitus of FSV is influenced by the fields and their capital situations. According to this hypothesis, the thesis then raises four questions:(1) What were the structures of the fields in which the FSV was produced?(2) What was the distribution of and competition for capital in the fields?(3) How was translator's habitus affected by the fields and the capital in them?(4) How did translator's habitus influence the production of the FSV?This study mainly adopts such qualitative research methods as literature research, case study, text analysis and theoretical thinking to answer the above questions. The major findings are:(1) The FSV was imbedded in various fields: the partitioned meta-field of power, the politicized field of literature, and specific field of translation of the FSV;(2) There were fierce capital competition among different parties(the CCP, the KMT and the Japanese forces), and translation was a way of capital accumulation;(3) Translator's structured habitus included the following four aspects: the tendency of selecting the source text that is in favor of the cause of Anti-Japanese war and CCP's capital accumulation; specific diction to the benefit of CCP's capital accumulation and the maintaining of the National United Front, and to the disadvantage of the Japanese forces and the pro-Japanese elements among the KMT; the style of expressions that is of nationalization, Chinesization and popularization to fill the gap between author and reader; the adoption of translation strategy that can facilitate readers' understanding of the content;(4) Meanwhile, translator's habitus influences the production of the FSV from the above mentioned four aspects. It comes to the conclusion that translator's habitus is strongly influenced by the fields and their capital situations. Therefore, the hypothesis raised up by this thesis is testified.It is hoped that this thesis will encourage scholars' more systematic application of Bourdieu's theory and open up discussions on the translation of non-literary and translation phenomena in the war setting.