A Study On Ma Ainong’s Translation Of Peter Pan From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

James Matthew Barrie’s novel Peter Pan is very popular with children’s readers.The novel tells the story of Peter Pan, a young boy who can fly, and his adventure in Neverland. Nowadays, Peter Pan is not only an ordinary boy who is reluctant to grow up, but a well-known western character symbolizing eternal childhood and endless adventurous spirit. Since Liang Shiqiu firstly translated the novel into Chinese in1929, the book has been translated by many Chinese translators, including Yang Jingyuan, Zhu Binzhong, Ren Rongrong and Ma Ainong, etc.. The thesis takes Ma Ainong’s translation as an example, for her language is simple, vivid, and contains some trendy words, which conforms to the preference of modern children readers.The translation has attracted many scholars to do research from different perspectives,such as Functional Equivalence Theory and Reception Aesthetics, but few pay attention to its translation process. The thesis tries to make a study on Ma Ainong’s translation process of Peter Pan in the light of Adaptation Theory.Linguistic Adaptation Theory was proposed by Jef Verschueren and perfected in Understanding Pragmatics in 1999. According to him, the three core concepts of Adaptation Theory are “variability”, “negotiability” and “adaptability”. “Variability”and “negotiability” endow language use with the possibilities of making continuous choices, while “adaptability” enables people to make language choices in accordance with pre-existing circumstances. As translation is an inter-lingual and inter-cultural communication, it is affected by factors in the text or out of the text. Translators have to make choices in what to translate and how to translate. Thus the process of translation is also a process of continuous choice-making. Through the study of the several Chinese versions of Peter Pan, the author finds that Ma Ainong’s process of translation is a process of making language choices to different contexts and structures. As one of children’s literary works, the main readers of Peter Pan are children, who have different appreciation of literary works due to their limited age,psychology and knowledge. In order to make the target children readers accept the translation, and feel the same way as the source children readers, translators have tomake choices constantly in their process of translation, and make adaptations to various contextual correlates and structural objects. Ma Ainong’s language choices made in her process of translation more obviously follow the Adaptation Theory.Therefore, the thesis attempts to make a qualitative analysis of Ma Ainong’s translation of Peter Pan from the perspective of Adaptation Theory.The study shows that Ma Ainong’s translation of Peter Pan is a process of continuous choice-making. The translation realizes adaptation from four aspects:structural adaptation, contextual adaptation, dynamic adaptation and salience of adaptation. In the light of Adaptation Theory, Ma Ainong’s translation of Peter Pan mainly adopts four translation methods: addition; division; recasting and conversion.