A Study Of Chinese Contemporary Works "Going Global" From Bourdieu's Capital Perspective

As China grows stronger after 1949,it is in urgent demand for cross-border cultural exchanges.Contemporary literature faithfully recorded the social evolution after the founding of New China,and can serve as one of the best medium for establishing China's global image.The government realized the value of China's literature "going global" as early as in the 1950s,and has then launched a series of projects including Chinese Literature and the Panda Books,trying to introduce China' s contemporary works to the world.Unfortunately,only a humble portion of the government's efforts delivered the expectation.However,the lessons and experience these pioneering projects offered contribute to the success of their descendants.As Chinese contemporary works continue to "go global",more and more translated works have won the favor of western readers,and some of them still rank among the world's largest book retailer Amazon.com 's best sellers.Previous translation studies on Chinese contemporary literature mainly focus on a particular writer,a particular book or a series of translated works,and tend to adopt the traditional text analysis approach.This paper expands the research object to the top 10 best sold translated Chinese contemporary novels on Amazon.com,and discusses the participation of Bourdieu's"Capital" concept throughout the whole production of these translations.Through analysis,this paper believes that the four forms of Capital-Cultural Capital,Social Capital,Economic Capital and Symbolic Capital-all have a substantial influence on the translations' final acceptance.In order for more Chinese contemporary works "going global",we should invite greater participation of foreign experts who possess rich cultural capital,and strive for closer cooperation with established western publishers that have already accumulated much social capital in the English literature field.