A Study Of Translation Variation In Wolf Totem From The Perspective Of Rewriting Theory With A Case Of Howard Goldblatt's Version

“Faithfulness” is treated as the primary criterion for translation for a long time,studies of translation variation have not been given sufficient attention.After Huang Zhonglian(1998)put forward the concept of translation vatiation in 1998,people took up focusing on translation variation gradually.Huang Zhonglian holds the view that translation variation is to meet the needs of specific readers in specific conditions.Accroding to rewriting theory,translation is rewriting or adaptaion of the original text,which is manipulated by ideology,poetics and patronage.It needs to be studied by considering the historical and cultural factors.Both rewriting theory and translation variation consider translation as a kind of adaption;they both emphasize and promote reader' statues;both of them free the translators' subjectivity to some extent.Therefore,this thesis studies translation variaiton from the perspective of rewriting theory and treats translation variation whose significances and acceptability will be researched in target language culture system as a violaiton of faithfulness to explore the deep relationship between rewriting theory and translation variaition and provide some inspirations for translation practice.Based on rewriting theory,taken translation variation phenomena as object of study and Wolf Totem as the study text,this thesis adopts literature review,exemplification and evaluation analytic method to describe the translation variation strategies as well as their effects and analyze how the cultural factors affect uses of these strategies on the foundation of descriptive approach of study.The combination of translation variation and rewriting theory also exploits the scope of literary translation studies and provides a new view for the translation study of Wolf Totem.The study finds out that Goldblatts used five translation strategies including supplement,deletion,edition,combination and remodeling in the translation of Wolf Totem and that uses of these strategies are influnced by ideology,poetics and patronage.It proves that translators should not only pay attention to the equivelance on word or sentence level but also focus on the readers' acceptance and cultural tolerance.In addition to practical texts translation,translation variation can also be used in literary translation.It also proves that if translators take the influences of ideology,poetics and patronage into account when using translation variation strategies,the translation variation will become more conducive to the successful translation.What's more,the relatonship of translation variaion and rewriting theory is also revealed in this thesis: in addition to being influenced by readers' demand,use of translation variation is also manipulated by ideology,poetics patronage.Therefore,translation variation phenomenon can be fully and reasonably explained from the perspective of rewriting theory.Three cultural factors of rewriting theory determine the presence of various translation variations to some extent,so rewriting theory can provide a theoretical basis for translation variation,which proves the rationality of the existence of translation variation phenomena and broadens the scope of translation variation study.Whereas,translation variation can be the method instruction of rewriting theory.Study on translation variation phenomena adopted in Goldblatt's translation of Wolf Totem can also provide some inspirations for successful transltion variation and effective Chinese cultural transfromation.