A Sociological Perspective: Li Jihong's Retranslating World Classics

In the past few decades, China has witnessed the development of Socio-Translation Studies which puts emphasis on investigating translation in the dynamic and complicated socio-cultural contexts, covering such aspects as the sociology of agents, the translation process and the cultural product. Nevertheless, despite all the progress, there remains in China much room for further exploration in terms of the empirical research towards the sociology of translation, the activity of retranslation and the combination of textual analysis with the sociological approach, to name a few. While the works of some widely-recognized Chinese translators have been reinterpreted under the framework of the sociological theories, Li Jihong, a commercially-successful translator who, while retranslating the world classics in cooperation with Guomai Culture Media Company Ltd., has raised controversy for the strategies used in the pursuit of cultural capital, yet his translating practice has not drawn sufficient attention in academia. In other words, the translator has been assuming a somewhat peripheral position in China's field of literary translation. However, numerous aspects of his retranslation are worthy of an in-depth investigation. For instance, it is counterintuitive that despite all the controversy and criticism, some of Li Jihong's retranslations have turned out to be bestsellers; it calls for an explanation why the agents involved in the retranslation employed the untraditional and controversial strategies in the publicity of the works; a detailed analysis and comparison should be conducted between the source texts, Li Jihong's target texts and other translators' translations to find out whether his versions are indeed the best as claimed by himself and the publisher, and why he would resort to the strategy of thick translation. Within this context, this research, through textual and paratextual analyses combined with the empirical methods including a well-designed questionnaire and the sentiment analysis, is intended to interpret Li Jihong's retranslating activities from translation through publication in the sociological perspective, with the intention of discovering the commercial motivations for retranslation and uncovering the nature of retranslation as a battleground on which the capital of various form is created, pursued and transformed into economic capital.