| The renowned literary work Chen'ai Luoding is a masterpiece of the Tibetan writer Alai, which has won him Mao Dun Literature Award—the China highest literary prize in 2002, and has received numerous praises. From the perspective of the Tibetan Maichi Chieftain's young master, Alai employed distinctive literary techniques to give an account of the decline and demise of Chieftain system in Tibetan history. Through a description of the complex contradictions and struggles within the Tibetan chieftain families, among different chieftains and between the chieftain and the central government, this novel reveals the Tibetan people's heavy life under the chieftains' oppression and the irresistible fate of chieftain system in the restructuring historical period. Being characteristic of exciting twists and turns, the novel displays a strong tinge of Tibetan folk customs, which has made a great hit with the reading public. The Fifth Mao Dun Literature Award committee members thought that Alai chose a distinctive narrative angle to give this novel a conventional and cultural significance. The slight magic color in the novel strengthens its flexibility of artistic expression. The exquisite language which is full of charm and rich in poetic flavor shows the author's outstanding artistic talent. This novel of great literary value has been translated into more than a dozen languages and enjoyed a huge circulation overseas. The English translation of Chen'ai Luoding was jointly accomplished by the famous American translator Howard Goldblatt and his wife Sylvia Li-chun Lin, and in 2002 was published in the United States by the Boston textbook publisher:Houghton Mifflin Company. The English version has been quite popular among English-speaking audience, and was selected as a Los Angeles Times Book for the Year. However, for some unknown reasons, the English translation till now hasn't been distributed in China and received very few researches from the point view of translation studies. To attain a proper status in the world literature field, outstanding Chinese literary works firstly need to be translated since the translating process acts as a bridge connecting different cultures and peoples, and then the translation need to be widely recognized. Therefore, the translating activity of literary works is of the utmost importance and the studies of the translation versions have a great value. In this paper, the author employs Jef. Verschueren's Pragmatic Adaptation Theory as the theoretical basis to give a thorough analysis of the translation of Chen'ai Luoding (Red Poppies, the translated version by Goldblatts'couple). Verschueren's Adaptation Theory interprets the overall use of language from a cognitive, social and cultural perspective, and proposed that language use is a continuous process of making linguistic choices under different levels of consciousness by making adaptation to meet the communicative needs. Translation is regarded as conversion between two languages, and a process of transfer from the source language into target language according to certain standards. According to Adaptation Theory, translation can also be regarded as a communicative activity in which Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin, the translators of this novel, make corresponding choices to adapt to the requirement of the receiving environment under the influence of various factors. This thesis examines in the process of translation how the translators achieve the desired translation purpose through the illustration of examples in the texts in both Chinese and English. From the aspects of linguistic context (cohesion and coherence, the linear sequencing), non-linguistic context (the physical world, social world and mental world) and language structuring (language utterance-building ingredients), the author of this thesis carries out a detailed exploration of the translated version, pointing out that in translation, the translators of the English version make a lot of adaptation to the target context and language structure to achieve translation purpose, so she finds therefore that Verschueren's Adaptation Theory has strong explanatory power for translation.
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