A Study Of Yang Xianyi And Gladys Yang’s Translation Of Call To Arms From The Perspective Of Eco-translatology

Recent decades have witnessed a great development of researches on translation theories. A general review of them, however, may reveal that micro perspectives have far outnumbered macro ones and that focus has been mostly on either the source text or the target text rather than on the translator’s subjectivity in the process of translation, which has been a notable phenomenon since the cultural turn in translation studies since the1970s but overlooked by many. It is Hu Gengshen’s Eco-translatology that has called greater attention to this turn by applying Darwin’s "adaptation" and "selection" and looking at translation as "a selective activity of the translator to adapt to the translational eco-environment." Eco-translatology is firstly meant the selection of the translator by "translational eco-environment" and then the selection of an appropriate form for translation by the translator. In this vein, the translator goes through the process of adaptation and selection on the basis of needs, competence and translational eco-environment, taking into full consideration linguistic, cultural and communicative dimensions. Therefore, the present thesis applies Hu Gengshen’s Eco-translatology to the case study of Call to Arms translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, centering on why the two translators chose the work for translation and how they translated it. Major findings of this tentative study reveal that both translators did go through the process of adaptation and selection as emphasized by Eco-translatology.