On The Chinese Version Of Walden By Xu Chi From The Approach Of Eco-translatology

Walden of Henry David Thoreau is widely acclaimed as one of the most important works of him, delineating the pastoral and idyllic life in Concord bordering on the Walden lake, on which numerous and exhaustive studies have been conducted. In the1940s Xu Chi(徐迟)made the first attempt to translate Walden from English to Chinese and has long been hailed as the primary choice for the appreciation of this masterpiece of transcendentalism despite subsequent versions by different translators in succession. Previous studies on Walden are multifaceted, some expounding on the linguistic styles, some delving into the ideological and cultural aspects, still some others approaching the translated version via conventional theories and assessment models in translatology. This thesis cleaves a different way to offer a new insight into the translation by switching to a newly emerging and far-reaching translational approach—eco-translatology, probing into the interaction between the translation environment and the translator.As the newly-established theory, eco-translatology defines translation as "the selection and adaptation by the translator to fit the translational eco-environment". In the translation process, either selection or adaptation is completed by the translator. It is thus safe to come to the conclusion that the theory puts a great emphasis on the translator’s dominance and centeredness in the translation process.The reason why Xu Chi’s version of Walden is selected for close exanimation is that his translation fits the translational eco-environment and is considered the paradigm among the various translated versions of Walden, winning high esteem from the general public. It is found that Xu Chi’s translation fits both the internal and external needs of him, which included his linguistic and cultural competence, his living ethics and his identification with the culture and society at that time. In addition, Xu Chi also made the selection and adaptation from the perspective of multi-dimensional transformations, namely,the linguistic dimension, the cultural dimension and the communicative dimension. In terms of the linguistic dimension, Xu Chi chose the words, expressions and syntactic patterns stylistically similar to those of prose; in the cultural dimension, many strategies were employed by him to better remove the impediments in the way between the source text and the target text resulting simply from cultural differences; while in the communicative dimension, Xu Chi, aimed at facilitating Chinese readers’s smooth understanding of the source text, made some personal adjustments rather than rigidly be faithful to the source text in order to better fulfill the communicative purpose.The whole thesis consists of5chapters with eco-translatology as the theoretical framework. Borrowing the inspiration from the natural ecosystem, eco-translatology is an analogy between the ecological environment and the translation activities. The thesis aims to make a tentative study on Xu Chi’s translation of Walden under the guidance of eco-translatology while revealing the fact that though it appears to be a unfledged or even immature theory still undergoing perfection, the theory does possess tremendous explanatory power in analyzing the conscious or subconscious efforts made by the translator to better serve the translation activities.