A Study on Translation of Chinese Children’s Literature from the Perspective of Polysystem Theory

Abstract

Polysystem Theory was developed in 1970s by Israeli scholar Itamar Even-Zohar borrowing ideas from the Russian Formalist of the the 1920s(Munday, 2001: 109). Although building on work by the Formalist, Even-Zohar reacts against ‘the fallacies of traditional aesthetic approach’(Even-Zohar 2002: 4), which had focus on ‘high’ literature and had disregarded as unimportant literary systems or genres such as children’s literature, thrillers and the whole system of translated literature. We put the translation of children’s literature in the general circumstance of social culture and find that children’s literature is on the margin of the literary system. This causes a lot of constraints and obstructions in writing and translating for children’s literature. This paper explores how the translation of children’s literature were influenced by cultural environment. the author conducted the development of Chinese children’s literature into 3 period and analyze how children’s literature improved in different eras from the perspective of polysystem theory.