A Study On The Internet Literary Translation From Eco-translatological Perspective

Since the end of the twentieth century, Internet culture has been the most widely and fastest spreadcultural phenomenon, which has the most impact on the human society. It takes the opportunity of modernscience and technology development especially the rapid development of Internet technology to affectalmost every aspect of human social behaviors and to trigger the innovation of the way of thinking andconcept. The Internet also builds a new convenient platform for the literature’s creation, storage and release.Therefore, Internet literature arises at the right moment. With the rapid development of Internet literaturewebsites and the readers’ desire for the foreign literature, it has been a literary popularity for the translationand literature lovers to introduce and translate the foreign best-seller literary works on the Internet. We callit Internet literary translation which refers to the online translation activities and behaviors, includinguploading the traditional literary translated works to the Internet and translating instantly on the Internetusing mouse, keyboard, various translation tools and soft-wares and translation BBS(Bulletin BoardSystem) and so on. This kind of online translation method not only provides a popular translating platformbut also makes us take a look at the elements of traditional literary translation such as translator, reader,translating strategies. And at the same time, this presents a new subject for traditional literary translationcriticism. This thesis will adopt the theory of Eco-translatology by Professor Hu Gengshen of TsinghuaUniversity to analyze this new kind of literary translation.Eco-translatology is trans-disciplinary to study translation from an ecological perspective with ecologyand translatology working together. Eco-translatology is a new theory to interpret translation process fromthe perspective of ecology. Thus it studies translation under a big ecological background. Of manytheoretical ideas in eco-translatology, adaptation and selection occupy the central position. This theory isproposed under a profound time background and social ideology. Both foreign and domestic scholars havemade theoretical and practical studies on this theory. Hu Gengshen and other scholars in China have maderesearches on eco-translatology by interpreting and exemplifying in details the interpretive function ofeco-translatology. With the systematic proposal of a series of terms and concepts, the basic theoreticalstudy of eco-translatology has been becoming mature gradually. Up until now, it has been applied in suchareas as literary translation, business translation and interpretation. This dissertation serves as an attempt toapply eco-translatology to explaining the Internet literary translation with eco-translatology as thetheoretical foundation. Descriptive method is employed to introduce Hu Gengshen’s ecological theory of Translation:Translation as Adaptation and Selection and the previous studies on the theory. And this method is alsoused to describe the new translational phenomenon on the Internet. Besides, contrast and comparison areadopted to describe the similarities and differences between source text and target text of Internet literarytranslation in various aspects, such as the structures and language features and to compare Hu’s theory withother relevant translation studies, and conclude that eco-translatology can provide a new and morecomprehensive perspective for the research of Internet literary translation. This paper will mainly cope withthree questions:1) in the Internet environment, how does the translational eco-environment select translatorand translated text?2) how do the translator and translated text adapt the Internet translationaleco-environment?3) how is the translator-centeredness reflected in the translating process? The authorcollects samples of translated text from several literary translation websites, comparing the source textswith the target texts to discuss their rationality and irrationality. Based on the above, three conclusions aredrawn:1) translation is translator-centered, the popularity of Internet literary translation work is determinedby the translators’ adaptation to the translational eco-environment and the adaptive selection of thefinalization of the text from dimensions of linguistics, culture and communication;2) domestication andforeignization are not absolute but are at different levels, and in different levels within one translation, onecan have different choices.3) Internet literary translation satisfies the readers’ need due to its instanttranslation and spread, but the quality needs improving and should be paid more attention.