Ideological impacts on literary translation – a descriptive study of translated literature in 1910–1931 and 1979–1999 in China

Abstract

Through looking into the themes and sources of translated fictions in China in the earlier (1910–1931) and later (1979–1999) parts of the twentieth century, published in Fiction Monthly and Translations, respectively, and comparing the translating strategies adopted by three translators, again in different periods, in their Chinese translating of the ideological contents in David Copperfield, this paper makes a descriptive and more comprehensive study of ideological impacts on translated literature from both the macro- and the micro-points of view. It concludes that both the themes and the sources of translated literature in a certain period are influenced to some degree by the ideologies of the time; and that ideologies also exert influence on the cultural orientations in the translators’ choice of translating strategies. The “rewriting” strategies adopted are inversely related to the correspondence of ideological paradigms between S-text and T-text: the less is the correspondence, the more drastic is the “rewriting”.