On Eileen Chang's Self-translation Of The Golden Cangue From The Perspective Of Translation As Adaptation And Selection

Eileen Chang is one of the few writers in the history of modern Chinese literature who can write skillfully in Chinese and English and have become very famous at home and abroad.While devoting herself to writing in Chinese and English,she was engaged in literary translation and translated a lot of American literary works,introducing excellent foreign culture to the Chinese readers;meanwhile,she translated some of her own novels and other Chinese literary works into English for Western readers.The English version of The Golden Cangue is one of Eileen Chang's self-translations.The original novel Jin Suo Ji is famous for its unique language style and rich Chinese cultural flavor.It is a novel with the richest cultural connotations among Chang's works.She advocated self-translation,believing that self-translators could better and more appropriately convey the original flavor and intentions to the target readers.This thesis studies Eileen Chang's self-translation of The Golden Cangue from the perspective of Professor Hu Gengshen's theory of translation as adaptation and selection.It discusses how Eileen Chang adapted to the translational eco-environment and made selections in theprocess of translation.It also analyzes what translation strategies she used in her self-translation.The research attempts to show the guiding significance of this theory in Eileen Chang's self-translation of The Golden Cangue and offer a new perspective for the studies of Eileen Chang's self-translation.According to Hu Gengshen,translation is a process in which the translator adapts to the translational eco-environment and makes selections in the environment.The translator should adapt to the translational eco-environment with the source text and the target language as its main components before putting pen to paper;and during the process of translation,he should make adaptive selections in linguistic,cultural and communicative dimensions and make appropriate transformations.The thesis explores Eileen Chang's selective adaptation to translational eco-translation from the perspective of translation as adaptation and selection,including exploration of Eileen Chang's adaptation to self needs,competence and the translational eco-environment.Then it analyzes Eileen Chang's three-dimensional transformations during her self-translation process,that is,the transformations in linguistic,cultural and communicative dimensions.The approach to translation as adaptation and selection is effective and significant in explaining Eileen Chang's self-translation of The Golden Cangue.It can be concluded,by analyzing Eileen Chang'sself-translation of The Golden Cangue from this new angle,that Chang adapted to the translational eco-environment by keeping the source text in view and adopted proper methods to make three-dimentional transformations in the translation to ensure readability of The Golden Cangue and promote the introduction of Chinese literature to other countries.