Hugo Awards And Sci-fi Fiction Translation

In 2015,Liu Cixin's sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem won The Best Novel of the 73 th Hugo Awards.Liu was the first one who ever won Hugo Awards in Asian world,and his laureate work The Three-Body Problem was the very first translated work among Hugo Awards winners.In 2016,Chinese female novelist Hao Jingfang's Folding Beijing won the Best Novelette of the 74 th Hugo Awards.These two breakthroughs mark the rising of China's sci-fi literature.While Chinese readers are cheering about China's literature finally gain the recognition of western world,they often neglect the truth that there are many defining factors behind the communication of culture.With the perspective of Bourdieu's concept Field,Capital and Habitus,the thesis meant to illustrate how the translator Ken Liu and the original works affect the result of Hugo awards.The thesis is divided into four parts.Part One is an overview of the academic study of Bourdieu's sociology study and Hugo awards.Part Two manifests the main concepts Field,Capital and Habitus,and how those concepts work in the translation field.Part Three introduces the influence of the original works,the life and writing experience of Ken Liu,which are exactly the Culture Capital and Symbol Capital in Bourdieu's theory,and then manifests how the Symbol Capital of the original works helps the acceptance of translated works,and how the Symbol Capital of certain translated works promote the original works in turn.Part Four explains how Habitus affects the macro level like choosing what kind of text to translate,and the micro level like specific translating strategy.After considering Chinese sci-fi literature in the Hugo Awards under the perspective of sociology,the study found that translation,the ideology of original works and the campaign of literature community all contribute to winning Hugo Awards.As for the translation,the translator Ken Liu's double culture nutrition,science and art education background and his own sci-fi writing achievements all bring him culture capital,and then symbolic capital.The universal value that the original works present is the reason why the two works earn favor of readers.Besides the literal factor,propaganda launched by literature community also plays an important role in Hugo Awards.