A Study On The Chinese Version Of The Joy Luck Club From The Perspective Of The Approach To Translation As Adaptation And Selection

The Joy Luck Club is a piece of magnum opus of Amy Tan, a famous Chinese-American woman writer.As soon as published in1989, this novel has become broadly welcomed by readers, and the top-seller infamous best-sellers of America. And the film adapted from this novel was nominated by Oscar in1994. Asa successful literary work full of Chinese features, The Joy Luck Club’s Chinese translation has arousedextensive attention in the academic field. In China, there are six versions of its Chinese translationaltogether. Cheng Naishan, who was a famous Shanghai woman writer, was the first one who translates thisnovel. And in the year of2006, Mrs. Cheng’s re-translation of this novel was published by ShanghaiTranslation Publishing House. This Chinese version is the research object of this thesis.The theoretical basis of this thesis is the approach to translation as adaptation and selection, putforward by Professor Hu Gengshen in2001. In the form of case study, this thesis has made a research onMrs. Cheng Naishan’s translation of The Joy Luck Club in2006. Different from the previous researches onthe basis of the approach to translation as adaptation and selection, this thesis aims at the holistic degree ofadaptation and selection of this translation through studying on the transformation on the linguistic, culturaland communicative dimensions. According to this theory, translation is defined as "the translators’ selectiveactivity adapting to the “translational Eco-environment”. Differing from “context”, here the “translationaleco-environment” has a much more comprehensive definition. It is a collection of many kinds of elementsthat can restrict translators to do optimal adaptation and optimization, and a whole including language,communication, culture, society, and author, reader, assignee, and other related factors. In the process oftranslating, multi-dimensional adaptive selection and selective adaptation have to be made. Mainly thiskind making is the transformation on the “three dimensions”, i.e. language, culture and communication.The best translation is the one with “the highest degree of holistic adaptation and selection”. On thelinguistic dimension, the thesis mainly analyzes the translation of Romanized Pinyin, acronym and lyrics,which are with special linguistic form; on the cultural dimension, the thesis mainly analyzes the translationof idioms and proverbs, which are full of Chinese cultural features; on the communicative dimension, thethesis mainly analyzes the translation of American brand and the name of film, which have influence on the cross-cultural communication between Chinese and America.Through this research, it is found that in the process of translating, language, culture andcommunication are the three most important dimensions. On the basis of full understanding of the originalnovel, Cheng Naishan adopted proper translating strategies to achieve successful transformations onlinguistic, cultural and communicative dimensions in her2006version. As a result, this translation adapts tothe whole translational eco-environment, and obtains a high degree of holistic adaptation and selection.