Social Deixis Translation In A Dream Of Red Mansions Via The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Social deixis is a significant component of language and culture. It can reflect thesocial status of the language users and the social relations between the participantsfrom linguistic structures. In our daily life, social deixis is widely employed theproper application of social deixis is an important part concerning capability oflanguage use. As a consequence, great importance has been attached to the analysis ofsocial deixis. However, influenced by Confucianism and feudalism, Chinese peoplepay much attention on the family relation in which man and woman should keepcertain distance and people with lower social status should show his respect to thosewith higher one. As a result, the quantity of social deixis in Chinese is much largerthan that of English. It is different from Chinese family culture that the westernersadvocate individualism and personal value, and they like to show themselves in frontof others. In this way, the derived social deixis are quite limited. In the practice oftranslation between English and Chinese, the language difference lead to a greatamount of vocabulary and culture gap, which make it difficult to insure the exactinformation transfer and complete faithful translation.In order to solve these difficulties aroused in the process of translation, we willemploy Verssuren’s Adaptation Theory to explore the social deixis translation fromChinese to English. According to Verssuren’s Adaptation Theory, the nature oflanguage is a process of continuous language choice consciously or unconsciously bylanguage users, and the choice-making happens on every level of language structures.The choice on language is dynamic and permanent. Language has three properties:variability, negotiability and adaptability, which are complementary and go throughthe whole process of language activities. For language adaptation, four angles areinvolved, namely: contextual correlates of adaptability; structural correlates ofadaptability; dynamics of adaptability and salience of adaptability.As a masterpiece of Chinese traditional culture, A Dream of Red Mansions has arich amount of social deixis. We can deduce the application of social deixis uasagefrom that book. So A Dream of Red Mansions is widely employed as important corpora for Chinese social deixis study. About the English translation of A Dream ofRed Mansions, there are many versions. In this paper, the most authoritative twoversions made by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang and another one delivered by DavidHawks are employed. With the two English versions as the corpora, this paperattempts to explore the deixis translation via the framework of adaptation theory, andexpects to shed light on deixis translation.This thesis consists of an introduction, the main body and a conclusion. Its maincontents are as follows:The first part is the introduction, which briefly introduces previous study onsocial deixis and adaptation theory, and then points out the importance of the Englishtranslation on Chinese social deixis from the adaptation theory perspective.The second part is the main body, which is made up of three chapters:Chapter One reviews and generalizes the definitions and classifications of socialdeixis made by different scholars and the three properties and four angles ofadaptation perspectives. Then it discusses the relation between adaptation theory andtranslation and proposes the significance of employing adaptation theory to guidesocial deixis translation.Chapter Two first compares the difference between English social deixis and thatof Chinese from the perspectives of polite pronoun, honorific terms, humilityexpressions, kinship terms, assumed kinship terms and names, which lead to thedifficulty of translation social deixis from Chinese to English. The second part of thischapter further analysises the factors leading to the differences including familyformation, blood concept, hierarchical system, religious effect, social system andvalues. All these factors directly or indirectly result in the formation of thosedifferences. The third part of this chapter discusses translation strategies which aim atsolving the divergence problems, including foreignizing method, domesticatingmethod and a combination of foreignizing and domesticating method. At the sametime, it points out that the ultimate objection of these methods is to pursue adaptivechoice of language.Chapter Three focuses on the previous three pragmatic angles to have a detailedstudy the social deixis of A Dream of Red Mansions, namely context correlates adaptability, structural correlates adaptability and dynamic correlates adaptability. Inthe contextual correlates of adaptation, it is studied from physical world, mental worldand social discourse world to explore the choice-making during translation with thepoliteness principle. In the structural adaptation, we mainly analysis the adaptation tothe language features of the original text from the angle of phonology andmorphology. In the dynamic correlates adaptation, we explore the dynamic languagechoice from honorific term, humility term, kinship term perspectives to pursue thetranslation principle which is be faithful to the original text and smoothness.The last part is conclusion, which makes a summary to the preceding analysisand points out the main purpose of this thesis. Translators are requested to makedynamic choices continuously on sound features, word formation, grammar and otherstructural levels according to related contexts, social conventions and other aspects.There is no distinction between good translation strategy or bad ones, for the purposeis to realize linguistic and contextual adaptation. And the adaptation theory runsthrough the entire process of translation and provides dynamic and flexible researchmethods for social deixis translation.