From The Perspective Of Translation As Adaptation And Selection To Analyze Two Versions Of David Copperfield

Translators, as the real translation action-taker, play an important role during the translation process. The studies about translators are one of the permanent subjects of translation and have a long history. But traditional translation studies require translators to abandon their own thoughts and repeat the original faithfully. Translators were named as"servant"and"machine"etc. However, the"cultural turn"movement in the 1990s widened a new perspective for translation research. Those translators'subjectivity has been paid more and more attention to than before.The present author wants to analyze David Copperfield from a new perspective of an Approach to Translation as Adaptation and Selection to study the translator's subjectivity. The Approach emphasizes the translator's central leading role. It defines translation as"a selection activity of the translator's adaptation to fit the translational eco-environment."Here the translational eco-environment refers to"the worlds of the source text and the source/target languages, comprising the linguistic, communicative, cultural and social aspects of translating, as well as the author, the client, and the readers."And the definition shows that both the adaptation and selection are due to the translator.The Approach is based on Darwinian principle of natural selection. The thesis is under the framework of the Approach to make a tentative comparison and contrast study about David Copperfield translated by Dong Qiusi and Zhang Guruo respectively. It emphasizes their adaptation and selection to needs, competence and eco-environments. Here needs include survival need and hobbies. Competence means bilingual and bicultural competence. All these elements will depend on the choice of translators in the translation process. And because culture is one of the typical important components of the translational eco-environment and the most important transformation perspective of the translators, the present author selects the cultural dimension as the perspective of the contrast and comparison. Through this way, it shows that the translator's subjectivity plays an important role in the translation process, including the selection of the original and translation strategies. Meanwhile, it also reminds all the translators that the subjectivity is relatively applied not absolutely. Therefore, it is necessary for the later translators to refine themselves and try their best to adapt to the translational eco-environment, so that we can get more and better target texts.