| The new historical novel My Life As Emperor is written by Su Tong who is one of the most famous writers of the avant-garde in modern Chinese literature. It has received great popularity at home and abroad since it was translated by sinologist Howard Goldblatt and published in 2005. However, little attention and few studies have been given to its English version. So far, there is no a systematic and comprehensive study on the translation of My Life As Emperor from the perspective of Adaptation Theory. Therefore, the author attempts to make a comprehensive study of the translation of My Life As Emperor under the guidance of Adaptation Theory.Adaptation Theory was first put forward by Belgian linguist Jef. Verschueren in 1999 and it studied the language use from a new angle. Adaptation Theory is a pragmatic theory which has strong explanatory power and good application value, and it is bound to have a bright prospective because it comprehends and interprets pragmatics from a new angle(He Ziran, Yu Guodong, 1999:428-435). Translation, as a special cross-cultural activity, is a process of translating the source language into the target language by following certain rules. Four angles of investigation are covered in Adaptation Theory: adaptation to contextural correlates; adaptation to structural objects; dynamic adaptation; salience of the adaptation process, which takes linguistic, cultural and social factors into account. The translator will be influenced and restricted by cognitive, cultural and social factors etc in the process of translation. In order to fulfill the translation purpose, the translator will make corresponding choices to adapt to specific contexts. Therefore, the theory can be employed in an attempt to study the translation of My Life As Emperor. The thesis is conducted by means of qualitative research method to analyze and generalize the translation of My Life As Emperor from the aspects of adaptation to communicative correlates(mental world, physical world and social world) and adaptation to linguistic structures(sound level, lexical level, syntactical level and text level). The thesis aims at explaining that the process of translating My Life As Emperor is a process of making choices.Through the study of the translation of My Life As Emperor from the perspective of Adaptation Theory, it can be concluded that the process of translating My Life As Emperor is a process of making flexible dynamic choices at the level of communicative correlates and linguistic structures in response to some purpose. Meanwhile, the success of the translation lies in the fact that the translator faithfully and smoothly conveys the contents and thoughts of the source text, and adapts to the reading habit of target-readers and meets their reading expectations. The significance of the research is as follows: Firstly, the research will enrich the study of My Life As Emperor and especially its English version since a few studies have been made on the source text and target text. Secondly, the thesis studies literary translation from the pragmatic prospective, which will provide a new angle for the translation of My Life As Emperor, which expands its research scope. Finally, the study will not only enable readers to have a more comprehensive and deep understanding of My Life As Emperor, but further prove the strong explanatory power of Adaptation Theory in literary translation by combining the theory with examples of the novel. Key Words: Adaptation Theory; My Life As Emperor; translation process... |
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