On The Retranslation Of Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens is a famous critical realism writer in the 19^th-century England.He created many classic works in his life and made significant contributions to the development of British critical realistic literature.Till now,his works are still favored by readers in all countries and enjoy a high reputation in the world.And Oliver Twist is one of his representative full-length novels.The novel profoundly reveals the cruel reality of the capitalist society and it enjoys great popularity among Chinese readers.Therefore,many translators translated the novel in succession.In 1914,Lin Shu firstly introduced Oliver Twist into China.According to statistics,until 2019,there have been over 30 Chinese versions of this novel so far.However,most studies are conducted on this novel from a literary point of view.Few studies are conducted on its Chinese versions from the perspective of translation.And the study on its translation from the perspective of retranslation hypothesis is very rare.Retranslation hypothesis is a series of inferences about retranslation made by some western scholars in the 1990s.Its core content mainly covers that the first translation of a work tends to assimilate the original work and reduce the otherness of the text.Compared with the first translation,later translations pay more attention to the structure and style of the original work,have the tendency to be closer to the original work and are returns to the source text.This paper adopts the novel's three representative Chinese versions of different times as the corpus,gives a descriptive study of the features of the three versions from the perspective of Toury's translation norms theory and conducts a comparative study of their closeness to the original work,in order to confirm or falsify retranslation hypothesis.This paper is divided into five chapters.Chapter 1 gives an introduction to Oliver Twist and its author,the significance,methodology and structure of the study.Chapter 2 gives a review of the previous studies on retranslation and retranslation hypothesis at home and abroad,and the domestic studies on Oliver Twist.Chapter 3gives a detailed introduction to Toury's translation norms theory.Chapter 4 conducts a diachronic and comparative study of three Chinese versions primarily from preliminary norms,initial norms and operational norms.Chapter 5 is the conclusion.Through this comparative study,it could be found that in the form of the target text,Rong Rude and Fang Huawen added the footnotes,not being found in the original work,and made many combinations and divisions of paragraphs in the original text.And in the syntactic structure,they made adjustments of word orders in terms of Chinese habits,while Jiang Tianzuo closely followed the original text in his version.As for the content,Rong Rude used traditional Chinese idioms to give a modifying description,while Fang Huawen adopted many four-character collocations and metaphors to give a figurative description.However,Jiang Tianzuo followed the original work closely to translate the work.Therefore,Jiang Tianzuo's version is the closest to the original work,compared with Rong Rude's and Fang Huawen's versions.This diachronic study shows that the version,the closest to the original work,is the first version,rather than the later version.So,the retranslation activities for Oliver Twist falsify retranslation hypothesis to some extent.