The Manipulation of Poetic and Ideology: Human Translation in Sour Sweet

Timothy Mo,a famous British writer whose works have won many important prizes,experiences both Chinese culture and English culture since his childhood.Due to this kind of experience,his works are usually concerned with the issue of cultural conflict.Among these works,Sour Sweet is the most well-known one in China,and it has also been filmed as Soursweet in 1988 with the famous actress Zhang Aijia.In Sour Sweet,Timothy Mo tells a story about a Chinese family’s struggle in the UK.After experiencing a serious of cultural conflict,among the three family members Chen,Lily and Mui,only Lily achieves a delicate balance.After defining the process of establishing oneself in a new environment as a kind of human translation,the article applies AndréLefevere’s theory to study the three characters’different responses to the cultural conflict,analyze how different poetic and different strategies adopted to deal with ideology affect their translation,explain why does or doesn’t he/she translates himself/herself successfully,and finally gets the conclusion:because Lily deals well with the dominant ideological and poetical currents,and makes appropriate choice in face of cultural translatability and untranslatability,so only she can translate herself successfully.