Research On The Field Of Life And Death From The Perspective Of Rewriting Theory

The Field of Life and Death is a mid-length novel composed by Chinese writer Hsiao Hung,which tells the living conditions of peasants in the villages near Harbin from 1920 s to 1930 s.Its English version was published in the 1970 s and gained popularity in western literary circles.The success of its English version not only lies in Hsiao Hung's profound writing skills but also the Howard's translation.Its successful experience is of great significance for Chinese contemporary literature to enter the western world.Lefevere put forward the Theory of Rewriting,proposing that “translation is rewriting”.Translation is not just an inter-lingual transformation between languages,but a translator's purposeful rewriting of the text source based on ideology,and poetics.Translation activities are constrained and influenced by socio-cultural factors such as ideology,poetics,and patronage.This thesis studies the English version of The Field of Life and Death from the perspective of rewriting theory.Based on the three key factors,the author probes the rewriting phenomenon of the translated version and analyzes the reasons for the rewriting phenomenon.The author finds that the English version can draw reader's attention in the western world because it conforms to the ideology of western readers.It is a literary work with Chinese characteristics and is accepted by foreign readers.Because in the 1970 s,China has establish diplomatic relations with Japanese and United States of America.Westerner want to further explore the relation between China and Japan as well as Chinese people's lives.This book takes Chinese people's war of resistance against Japanese aggression as the background.On the one hand,the rural life in northeast China,which meets the western readers' expectation for the political and rural life in the special historical period of China.On the other hand,Hsiao Hung writes a lot about the suffering and miserable lives of Chinese women in a specific historical environment,so as to draw people's attention to women and promote the improvement of women's status.This kind of literature is in line with the theme of western women's literature in the 1970 s.Howard adopted excellent and bilingual skills to translate The Life and Death Field based on ideology and poetics,and uses translation methods such as amplification,literal translation,and free translation to rewrite the political sections,religious sections,folklore sections,lexical level,rhetorical devices and syntactic structures.Finally,American Indiana Press,East Asia Department of Indiana University and Hsiao Hung Literature Prize promote the English version through various channels,including newspapers,television,Internet and other media,so as to better spread it to the western world.