关键词: 《老人与海》; 译介; 重译

Abstract: The Old Man and the Sea, a perfect work by Earnest Hemingway in his old age, has gained a new life and everlasting charm through retranslations ever since it was first translated and introduced into China in the 1950s. Regarding translation as a social act constrained by norms, the present paper studies the translation of The Old Man and the Sea against its social, political and historical settings, and describes the translation and introduction process of more than six decades through an in-depth probe into various extra-textual motivating factors. The scope of the research is narrowed from the total 302 Chinese versions of The Old Man and the Sea down to 178 complete translations. And the major findings of the research are as follows. From the perspective of the form of translation and introduction, it can be said that The Old Man and the Sea has been read in China both as a classic and a piece of children’s literature, with the latter being more prominent. From the perspective of the period of translation and introduction, it is found that the process from the initial slow development in translation and introduction to two climaxes of retranslation reveals the rivalry between ideology and literary consciousness, while the journey from a “silent period” to a “summit” in the retranslation of The Old Man and the Sea unveils the competition between literary consciousness and economic motivation. In a word, the retranslation of The Old Man and the Sea has always been manipulated in the multi-causality system consisting of ideology, literary consciousness and economic motivation of both the patron and the translator.

Keywords: The Old Man and the Sea; translation and introduction; retranslation