Julia Lovell's Translation Of Lu Xun's Stories:a Perspective Of Actor-network Theory

The inseparable relationship between translation and society leads to the tentative construction of the system of translation studies and generation of sociology of translation.The sociology of translation focuses on translators' behavior and translating process where the involved agents mediate and negotiate with each other.From a broader perspective of sociology,the translation studies will become more dialectical and comprehensive.Among the sociological theories,the Actor-network Theory attaches great importance to the process and factors.Therefore,this thesis takes Julia Lovell's translation of Lu Xun's fictions as a case study in the light of Latour's Actor-network Theory.Based on the Actor-network Theory,this thesis aims to demonstrate the whole process of Lovell's translation of Lu Xun's stories.The relevant research questions are raised as follows:(1)What are the translation features of Lovell's version at lexical,syntactic and textual level,compared with Yang's and Lyell's versions?(2)How do Lovell as well as other actors and actants in the network influence the features?(3)How is the whole network formed with the interaction of actors and actants?The thesis employed the corpus-based comparative study on Lovell's,Yang's and Lyell's versions and found out the features of Lovell's version.On the basis of textual analysis and literature analysis,the thesis attempted to answer the three research questions from the perspective of Latour's Actor-network Theory.It can be found that compared with Yang's and Lyell's versions,Lovell's version is diverse in words,short in sentence,compact in structure and readable in content.She tended to choose the words with most abundant meanings and translate the original text with the most concise expression.All these features discovered are,firstly,related to Lovell's identity and ideas,and are also the results of the network of producing,publishing and spreading constructed by many actors and actants such as the publisher,Yang's and Lyell's versions,great events and copyeditor.The study not only contributes to the understanding of Lovell's version of Lu Xun's fictions,but also discusses success of the whole network and the roles of actors and actants,which can shed some light on the translation studies from the sociological perspective in the future and the “going out” of Chinese literature.