Literary Translation From The Perspective Of Contextual Correlates Of Adaptability

Literary translation is a cross-cultural communicative activity with the translator as a medium between the writer and the target readers. The understanding of literary language depends greatly on context, hence context is an indispensable factor in literary translation.Jef Verschueren's pragmatic adaptation theory studies language use from cognitive, social and cultural perspectives and his adaptation theory perceives language use as a continuous process of making choice and adaptation. Three hierarchically related properties of language are needed to account for this―making choices‖, namely variability, negotiability and adaptability. The notion of adaptability enables us to assign four clear tasks to pragmatic descriptions and explanations, namely contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, the dynamics of adaptability and the salience of the adaptation processes.Contextual correlates of adaptability is defined as the adaptation between linguistic choice-making and context in language. This thesis adopts contextual correlates of adaptability in adaptation theory as the theoretical basis, and selects the English version of Bian Cheng as examples to analyze the adaptation to linguistic context and communicative context. Linguistic context includes contextual cohesion, intertextuality and sequencing, and communicative context consists of language users, the mental world, the social world as well as the physical world.Through analyzing different aspects of the contextual correlates of adaptability, this thesis proves that a successful and acceptable translation is the result of adaptation to both linguistic context and communicative context and illustrates the significance of applying contextual correlates of adaptability to literary translation practice.