An Analysis Of The Translation Strategies Of Addressary Words In "Wolf Totem" From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Address forms, the important information delivered to the listeners, can establish, maintain and strengthen the relationship among the communicators. And the proper use of address form is of great importance to the success of the communication. However, the Chinese address forms differ considerably from the English address forms due to the cultural backgrounds differences, values differences and thinking models differences. Therefore, how can translate address forms accurately and vividly become the key to cross-cultural communication.According to Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory, language use is a continuous process of choice-making under different levels of consciousness so as to satisfy the communicative needs due to the internal and external reasons. The translation of address forms indeed is a transformation in two languages, so the Adaptation Theory can be used as the theoretical basis to study the translation of address forms.First, the thesis introduces the background, objectives and significance of the research. In the background and objectives of the research, the thesis presents the issues that the thesis is going to deal with and how to solve them. Second, the thesis provides a comprehensive literature review on the translation of address forms, the translation from the perspective of Adaptation Theory and the English version Wolf Totem. Meanwhile, the thesis briefs on the theoretical framework which is divided into two parts:a brief introduction of Adaptation Theory and the key notions of contextual correlates of adaptability. Third, qualitative study is designed in the paper, and the author adopts the Adaptation Theory as the guidance to study the translation of address forms in Wolf Totem from four angles of the Adaptation Theory, which are contextual correlates of adaptation, structural objects of adaptation, dynamics of adaptation and salience of the adaptation process.The examples collection and the detailed study on the analysis will present in the Chapter Four. Last, the thesis concludes by summarizing the major findings of the study and discussing the limitation of the study.By means of the study, the author finds that in the process of translation, the translator employs literal translation, free translation, substitution, omission and transliteration to achieve various adaptations to the original text as well as the target readers, which may also provide some reference value for the translation of address forms in literary works.