A Study On Evan King's Translation Of Luotuo Xiangzi From The Perspective Of Lefevere's Rewriting Theory

Translation since ancient times has been considered as a conversion between languages.Faithfulness to the original text also became a criterion for judging the whether the translation is good or not.Since the 1970 s,the emphasis of translation studies has transferred from linguistic level to cultural level,which is called cultural turn.A group of significant scholars appeared such as Itamar Even Zohar,Gideon Toury,Theo Hermans,Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere.One of the representatives,Andre Lefevere,believed that translation is not carried out in vacuum but is certainly influenced by social and cultural factors,such as ideology,poetics,patronage and so on.The translated text is the production of the translator who was under the influence of many factors in the target culture.Evan King's Rickshaw Boy was the first English version,which won a great success as soon as it was published in 1945;As a result,Lao She became “the most popular Chinese writer in America”.However,the translator made a lot of alterations,such as random deletions or additions of the plot.Therefore,This paper will analyze Evan King's translation of Luotuo Xiangzi from the perspective of rewriting theory in order to answer these questions--what kind of changes the translator made,What prompted him to make such alterations and why the English translation of Luotuo Xiangzi by Evan King can make a great success.Compared with the previous studies,this paper is going to respectively discuss from three aspects of rewriting theory: ideology,poetics and patronage.In addition,in terms of ideology,this paper will supplement the influence of translator's personal ideology on translation strategies so as to give a more clear analysis and interpretation about Evan King's rewritings of the text.The study found that Rickshaw Boy mainly made five obvious rewritings: 1)deleting of the plot;2)highlighting sex description;3)turning a tragic ending into a happy one;4)rewriting of the image of Yuan Ming;5)Adding two new characters.The reason why Evan King made these rewritings is that his translation was influenced by the ideology,poetics and patronage at that time in America.Therefore,in order to conform to the dominant ideology,poetics and patronage,Evan King did such alterations,which not only met the needs of the target readers but also spread Chinese culture.According to this,it is inevitable that Rickshaw Boy achieved great success.Meanwhile,this study can not only help us to have a better understanding of Evan King's Rickshaw Boy,but also tell us that in order to make appropriate translation choices and decisions,the historical,social and cultural factors should be taken into account in translation and translation quality assessment.