On The Collaboration And Compromise Among Translators In English Translating Of Selected Works Of Mao Tse-tung

Throughout the translation history,collaboration and compromise is very normal in translating practice.Almost every translating activity is accompanied with collaboration and compromise among translators.Major translating activities in history,such as Buddhist scripture translating spanning from the Eastern Han Dynasty to the Song Dynasty,scientific and technical translating at the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty,translating of Western learning lasting from Opium War to the May Fourth Movement,and the translating of political writings after the found of People's Republic of China,have all adopted the method of collaborative translating.In the dynamic process of translating,collaborative translators make comprehensive consideration of translating purposes,intention of original writers,style of text,translating strategies,rendering skills,as well as cognitive level and reception ability of readers,and then solve the translating problem together.They should also make choices and compromises to some extend.That is to say,translated text is the result of collaboration and compromise among translators.English translating of Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung(hereafter referred to as Selected Works)is a great attempt of Chinese government to introduce Chinese culture to the international world,which is of historic importance.This job lasted more than twenty years,and its success is due to the hard work of a number of experts and scholars who worked day after night and strived for perfection.This thesis takes the perspective of socio-translation theory to analyze the influences of certain social and historical elements such as politics,economy,culture,and ideology upon the collaborative translators of Selected Works from a macroscopic view,while from a microscopic view to describe the constraint among different collaborative translators to see how they chose texts and strategies,planed processes,controlled quality,and finally made compromises.This thesis carries out a qualitative analysis on the collaboration and compromise through literature review,comparison of different English versions of the text,and case studies.After an objective description this thesis concluded as follows.First,translating activities of large scale in history all developed from the small scale,and collaborative translating model gradually came into being during this process.These activities were led by official government.Collaborative translators were diversified and strictly selected,negotiation mechanism was dynamic,translating standards were strict and specific,and the final translated text was always decided by official organizations.Second,translating is a process of collaboration,negotiation and compromise of collaborative translators.Last but not least,the compromise and negotiation of translators were limited by political ideology,nature of the source text,and the personal translating habits of translators.This thesis consists of six chapters.The first chapter is introduction,mainly describes the significance and purpose as well as the study method of this thesis.The second chapter is the literature review of studies on collaborative translating and studies on English Translating of Selected Works.The third chapter reviews major collaborative model in Chinese translating history and summarizes three major features of collaboration and compromise among translators,i.e.diversified translators,dynamic communication and specific compromise.The fourth and fifth chapters are the main body of the thesis.It briefly describes the process of English translating of Selected Works,and then discusses the collaboration and compromise among translators,and finally describes the collaboration and compromise with text comparison and specific examples.The sixth chapter is the conclusion of the thesis.