An Eco-translatological Analysis Of The Translation Of Turbulence From The Perspective Of Adaptation And Selection

Turbulence(《浮躁》,2007),one of the masterpieces of Chinese contemporary writer Jia Pingwa,was translated as Turbulence(1)by famous American sinologist and translator Howard Goldblatt.It exposes the issues existing at the initial stage of reform and opening up policy and the emptiness beneath the impetuous and impulsive surface of the society,which depicts the real current situations of the late 10 years or more of the last century.In 1988,Turbulence was awarded Pegasus Prize for literature,which is established by Mobil Corporation of United States.The English translation was released in 1991,which helps to carry forward the Chinese culture,especially the local civilization of Shanxi Province.A certain number of papers or researches on the culture-loaded words or stylistic characteristics of Turbulence are carried out from the perspective of communicative translation or the relevance theory,but none from a macro perspective to make an in-depth comparative analysis.Eco-translatology is a relatively new theory which adopts Darwin’s idea of“Natural selection,survival of the fittest”.It absorbs and combines the essences of ecology and translation studies.When it comes to the translating practice,translators have to make adaptive selection from the aspect of the internal eco-structure such as the three dimensional transformation so as to gain a selective adaptation to the various factors of the translational eco-environment.Under the guidance of eco-translatology, this thesis tries to analyze the translator’s translating strategies and how the eco-environment of original text is represented in the translation from the aspects of adaptation and selection, and the three-dimensional transformation. Through a comprehensive and systemic comparison between the source text and the translated version, the research finds that Turbulence translated by Howard Goldblatt adapts itself to the translational ecological environment and embodies the subjectivity of the translator. In the linguistic dimension, the translator adopts the liberal translation method in translating dialects,characters’ names and the fuzzy numeral expressions. And translating strategies such as partial adjustment or reorganization of events and natural shift of the syntactic structures are adopted to make the translated text as coherent and logical as the original one. Regarding the cultural dimension, translating strategies like liberal translation method, cultural ellipse or annotation perfectly help represent the unique rural culture in Shanxi Province. In communicative dimension, the adoption of literal translation achieves the author’s communicative intention and the cultural exchange.As a whole, the English translation of Turbulence achieves a relative high degree of adaptation and selection as a whole in the dynamic process of tanslating.This thesis is conducted by analyzing the translator’s subjectivity and his selection of translation method according to the condition of adaptation to various elements of the translational eco-environment, which will facilitate the critic study of literature translation, and shed fresh light on the translation of Chinese contemporary fiction into Western language and the popularization abroad.