A Comparative Study Of The Three Chinese Versions Of Of Mice And Men From The Perspective Of Translation As Adaptation And Selection

John Steinbeck is a famous America writer. Throughout his life, he has written a lot of works, and Of Mice and Men is just one of his masterpieces. It is so wonderful that it makes him be known to everyone. What’s more, because of this novel, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. When the novel came out in 1937, it achieved a great success. Up to now, it has been translated into many languages, and there are so many Chinese versions in China. Qin Si(秦似)translated the novel in 1942, which came out before the founding of the People’s Republic of China1. Several decades later, the second version of this thesis came out in 1977 by Tang Xinmei(汤新楣)on the eve of the Reform and Opening up of China. At the beginning of the 21st century, the third version in this paper was translated by Zhang Shuzhi(张澍智)With the development of society, economy and culture, more and more versions of Of Mice and Men are printed for the readers, while these three translations can stand for different historical periods. Taking all these factors into consideration, the author selects them as the subject of the study.Of Mice and Men has always been the hot topic among the people who tend to conduct studies on it, while most of the researches focus on the novel itself. The research about the translations needs to be strengthened. In this situation, it is meaningful for us to apply the Translation as Adaptation and Selection2 theory to make a comparative study about these three versions. Professor Hu put forward the theory in his book- An Approach to Translation as Adaptation and Selection which was published in 2004. He applies Darwin’s principle of natural selection to translation studies and defines translation as "a selection activity of the translator’s adaptation to fit the translational eco-environment." (胡庚申,2004:119). He uses two perspectives adaptation and selection to explain the process of the translation systematically. Furthermore, he proposes and demonstrates the translator centeredness, the multi-dimensional adaptation and adaptive selection translation principles as well as the three-dimensional transformation translation methods. A lot of people agreed with him when he put forward this new perspective. In a word, he proposes a new perspective on the translation studies.This thesis intends to investigate the translators’adaptation and selection under different eco-environments in different historical periods. The study reveals that these three versions stand for their own histories and they are also the results of the three translators who undertake the process of adaptation and selection in their own eco-environments.Through the comparative study from the perspective of TAS, this paper aims at enriching the translation studies about this novel; it can also provide a new perspective to translation studies.