A Contextual Adaptation Perspective To Two Chinese Versions Of Pride And Prejudice

The concept of context is one of the key notions in pragmatics and has been considered as an important research object in communication studies. Translation, as a process of information exchange between languages, can be considered as a complicated communication activity with the translator as a mediate agency between the source writer and the target reader. Thus, translation is inseparable from context and it is always affected by contextual factors of society, culture and psychology. In Understanding Pragmatics, Jef Verschueren put forward Adaptation Theory, and he proposed that language use is a continuous making of linguistic choices with different degrees of salience for the purpose of adaptation. Translation, a special form of language use, is a cross-cultural communication affected by many contextual correlates, therefore Adaptation Theory can offer guidance in translation studies. From the aspect of the Adaptation Theory, translation can be considered as a process of continuous choice making according to different contextual adaptation under different degrees of salience of translators.Based on Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, two Chinese versions of Pride and Prejudice is studied and compared from communicative context and linguistic context from the point of contextual adaptation. Combining the core of Adaptation Theory with translation practice, translation strategies and language forms in these two Chinese versions is compared, explained and judged in this thesis. From the angle of contextual adaptation, this thesis reveals many factors which affects translation quality and explains inside and outside reasons that different contexts lead to different versions. The aim of this thesis is to illustrate the important significance of contextual adaptation to translation practice and translation evaluation. After careful analysis and comparison of different translation strategies and language forms in the different versions of Pride and Prejudice, some conclusions were reached: translation is a process of dynamic adaptation of contexts, and translators should make proper choices after a comprehensive, dynamic and prudent consideration to all contextual factors involved in translation process; different translation strategies such as domestication, foreignization, etc., with their own values, are just the different emphasis of scales on contextual adaptation by translators; there is no"ultimate translation"since translation is changeable in the dynamics of context.In a word, Contextual adaptation not only provides a comprehensive and multi-dimensional perspective for translation practice, but also offers an objective and multi-dimensional standard for translation evaluation.