Adaptability In The Choice-making Process Of Translation

The history of translation studies has produced quite a lot of significant insights. But few of them could provide us with a systematic and unified framework to take into account all these. This thesis thus takes a pragmatic perspective on the investigation of how these factors individually or collectively work in translation, claiming that translation is a dynamic choice-making process involving certain degrees of salience with the aim of achieving adaptability in terms of linguistic reality and contextual correlates.The thesis begins with a brief review of the pragmatically oriented translation studies in the past, which reminds us of the problems and deficiencies in applying the findings in pragmatics to the study of translation. Based on the investigations of adaptation theory, this thesis reveals the special embodiment of choices and adaptation of verbal communication in translation through a detailed and systematic analysis of the dynamic adaptation in translation. This thesis mainly discusses translation from the pragmatic point of view and takes translation as a dynamic choice-making and adaptation process.Verschueren's linguistic adaptability theory offers us a good perspective to formulate this adaptability framework of translation to investigate the work of the various elements individually or collectively. Hopefully, this framework will be helpful for translation practice as well as beneficial to our understanding of translation so as to facilitate the establishment of translation studies as a discipline of science, which not only serves translation itself but also better informs our postmodern conceptions of literary and non-literary discourse, language, culture, social relationship and identity.