Abstract
The paper aims to investigate the issue of ideology and poetics as a form of control over translator which results in the manipulation or rewriting of the source text(s) by analyzing Herbert A. Giles' English translation of Liaozhai. Giles is a great sinologist, who published the first edition of Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio in 1880, during the Victorian era. He left out many stories that were erotic or which were viewed as offensive. He chose to rewrite the sexual descriptions and remove the author's notes after the stories. The choices he made in translating this Chinese classic works is the result of the prevailing political and moral values and predominating poetics standards of the Victoria Age. Translation is a cross-cultural activity which takes place in real socio-political and economic situations where people may have significant interests in the production or reproduction of a specific text in a given community. Translators may face a great deal of pressure in their work in terms of quality standards, faithfulness, ideology and poetics. Therefore, translation may be subjected to several conscious acts of selection, addition or omission.
Highlights
Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio or Liaozhai Zhiyi is a collection of nearly five hundred mostly supernatural tales written by Pu Songling in Classical Chinese during the early Qing Dynasty (1613-1912)
The paper aims to investigate the issue of ideology and poetics as a form of control over translator which results in the manipulation or rewriting of the source text(s) by analyzing Herbert A
He left out many stories that were erotic or which were viewed as offensive. He chose to rewrite the sexual descriptions and remove the author's notes after the stories. The choices he made in translating this Chinese classic works is the result of the prevailing political and moral values and predominating poetics standards of the Victoria Age
Summary
Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio or Liaozhai Zhiyi is a collection of nearly five hundred mostly supernatural tales written by Pu Songling in Classical Chinese during the early Qing Dynasty (1613-1912). Among the many English versions, Herbert Allen Giles'—Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, published in 1908, shares the highest reputation, and is claimed widely to contain the most stories His translation is among the first to introduce Chinese classics to the English speaking world, and since publication it has been considered the spokesman of its author—Pu Songling, for well over one hundred years in the west (He, 2009). If Giles' English version was translated back into Chinese, Chinese people would be definitely shocked because his translation differs in many ways from the original stories which the Chinese readers are familiar with (Zeng, 2010) With his extraordinary achievements on researches of Sinology, how can Giles go that far away from the original book? This paper aims to investigate the issue of ideology and poetics as a form of control over translator which results in the manipulation or rewriting of the source text(s) to justify Giles' choices in his translation of Liao Zhai by analyzing the elements which push him to make his decisions
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