| Retranslation is one of the characteristics of cultural prosperity.Since the occurrence and development of translation,especially in the field of literary translation,retranslation became an enduring phenomenon.Retranslation comes from translation practice,and develops along with the development of translation history.Many scholars have expressed their views on the subject of retranslation phenomenon.To be sure,retranslation is significant and greatly necessary.On the one hand,from the perspective of language development,people's use of language develops with the times,and therefore retranslation is necessary;on the other hand,in order to promote the progress of translation practice,retranslation can help the translator perfect his translation work.However,we should also see that the market is flooded with translation works of poor quality,so it is greatly necessary for us to avoid the waste of resources and ensure retranslation to follow certain norms.Based on the previous retranslation studies,the thesis intends to re-interpret the retranslation of literary works from Bourdieu's sociological point of view.Classic literary works become the first choice of retranslation because of their canonicity.In this paper,David Copperfield,a masterpiece written by Charles Dickens,a famous British novelist in the Nineteenth Century,is chosen as the object of the case study.According to the author's rough statistics,there are now approximately twenty-one Chinese versions of David Copperfield.Therefore,this book can be a valuable representative as the research object of retranslation.By tracing different versions for the same original,we can appreciate the homogeneous qualities and the differences of different versions of the same source text,and explore the translation strategies and retranslation techniques of each translator.This paper applies concepts like “field”,“aging” and “distinction” in Bourdieu's sociology,taking the retranslation of David Copperfield for example in order to make a descriptive study of literary retranslation.After more than 100 years of evolution,some of these translations have already been eliminated by history,and few readers read them now.However,there are other translations that have become classics.They did not restricted by the times,and their lives continued.In the field of retranslation,translators often seek to obtain a kind of “distinction” in various possible ways to make the translation stand out,and try to make their own translation(s)close to a classic.Socio-translation studies is a new perspective for translation studies in recent years,and its theoretical construction has been discussed in many countries.However,the practical application of socio-translation theory remains to be explored by translation researchers.Methodologically,this paper conducts a comprehensive method of quantitative and qualitative methods to study the phenomena of retranslation.We will not only focus on the sociological analysis of different retranslation versions,but we will also give translation criticism and comparison on specific translation text.We will not stick to judging whether each version is good or bad.We will try to focus on the analysis of the relationship between the translation and the language use and cultural mechanism of a certain time in the diachronic dimension,and the diachronic interaction among various versions.The findings of this study are as follows: the aging phenomenon does exist,but the rule of text aging does not necessarily synchronizes with times,the language use of a translation version is closely related to a translator's subjectivity;later translation versions are the continuums of previous ones which belong to the same field and they are competing with each other;and the life of a translation is subject to the times and readers;some translations live beyond times and others can only perform their service in the period when they appeared;a translation version has its own object of service,and is subject to the evaluation and recognition of readers. |
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