The Image of Jews Reconstructed in A Chinese Translation of Oliver Twist from the Perspective of Imagology

The image of Jews,as the“other”,constructed in Oliver Twist by Dickens and reconstructed in its Chinese translation by Wen’an He(1977/1997)1 is studied at the level of lexical items from the perspective of imagology in this paper.Lexical items involving the image of Fagin,the representative of Jews,are negative in the source work.In translating the lexical items to reconstruct Fagin’s image,the translator retains the features of irony and vulgarity carried with them.So,the image of Fagin is generally transported into the target culture basically unchanged.However,due to the translator’s individual reason or the social background of China at that time,those lexical items with religious connotation in the source text are translated without explanation,and as a result,the image of Jews constructed by this kind of lexical items fails to be conveyed to the target readers.