This is an analytical study of the author’s Chinese translation of Yes Prime Minister (London: BBC Books, 1986), a work characterized by British political humour. Adopting a target-oriented approach, the book aims primarily to uncover the regularities that mark the relationships between function, process and product of the translated text. It finds that the translation product has been overdetermined by the interplay of a large number of factors besides the source text, namely, socio-political conditions, literary and translation traditions, and the translator’s poetics and ideology. The findings are brought to bear on a number of theories, especially the Polysystem theory and other theories of the so-called “Manipulation School”. An augmented version of the Polysystem hypothesis is proposed in an attempt to better accommodate investigations into the role of the translator together with other socio-cultural factors involved in the translation.
作者簡介
Chang Nam Fung is Associate Professor in the Department of Translation at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. in translation studies from the University of Warwick and has been an active scholar in the field both as a practitioner and a theorist. A frequent contributor to journals such as Babel, The Translator, Perspectives and Target, his most notable works include the translation of Oscar Wilde’s comedies and of Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay’s Yes Prime Minister (The Chinese University Press, 1993). He was a four-time winner of the Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Award, and also a winner of the Research Excellence Award for 2003–2004 at Lingnan University.
