Selection And Adaptation In Translation: A Comparative Study Of Two Chinese Translations Of Gone With The Wind

Selection of translation strategies and criterion of translation criticism are always main issues in the translation studies. Throughout the history of translation, almost all the debates are focused on the basic problems encountered by translators in doing translating, such as form or meaning, source culture or target culture, writer's intentions or readers' expectations. These choices happen in the process of translation and will eventually influence the determining of translation strategies and translation criterion. Nowadays, scholars and researchers spare no efforts to interpret implications of theories introduced from other fields, hoping these basic problems of translation can be solved properly. It can be said that translation studies have been absorbing the nutriment from other sciences, which supply systematic and effective approaches to scholars' researches on translation.Xie Tianzhen(2004) proposes three breakthroughs in contemporary western translation studies should be summarized as the two turns: linguistic turn and cultural turn. Linguistic turn in translation studies results from the linguistic turn in the development of philosophy and benefits a lot from the development of linguistics. While cultural turn in translation studies cannot occur without the influence of hermeneutic philosophy, modern philosophy and post-modern cultural studies. Therefore, from the view of philosophy and linguistics, it is noticeable that many scholars and researchers have already enlarged the scope of translation studies by absorbing new theories from other fields.Jef Verschueren put forward Theory of Adaptation and a Perspective on Language in his book Understanding Pragmatics in 1999 and intends to explore the problems of language use. Five years later, Hu Gengshen published his book An Approach to Translation as Adaptation and Selection in 2004 and aims at analyzing phenomena in translation. Verschueren and Hu Gengshen are greatly influenced by Darwinist Evolution Theory. Jef Verschueren uses choice-making and adaptation to describe the process of language use, while Hu Gengshen adopts notions "Selection" and "Adaptation " to describe the process of translation. Their thoughts bring us a new thinking and a brand-new insight into problems in translation. Therefore, under the guidance of their theories, we view translation as a dynamic process of selection and adaptation and establish a tentative model for translation. The discussion of selection and adaptation in the process of translation is presented at two levels, namely, the language-internal level and the language-external level. In this way, many issues, for example, domestication or foreignization, faithfulness or treason, can be properly explained.A thesis with only theoretical materials and deduction is far from enough. In order to make this study more convincing, authentic examples taken from the two Chinese translations of Gone with the Wind, together with their different social and cultural backgrounds, translators' intentions and readers' cognitive ability, have been compared and analyzed in detail in the thesis. In conclusion, the author holds that translation is a process of continuous and dynamic selection and adaptation. Translators can adopt certain translation strategy to achieve the desired purpose in a flexible way. The target text is the product of translator's selection and adaptation. A translation should not be simply viewed as good or bad if only from a static and absolute viewpoint since the process of selection and adaptation is dynamic. An appropriate translation should possess the highest degree of adaptation to the structure of the source text, translation intentions, social background, demands for culture communication, and readers' expectations, etc.This thesis takes advantage of Verscheren's and Hu Gengshen's theories to explore specific problems of translation, in which the process of translation can be studied with the comprehensive investigation into both language-internal factors and language-external factors, which has something different from the traditional studies mainly focused on merely linguistic transference.