A Study On Sidney Shapiro’s Translation Of Daughters And Sons From The Perspective Of Jef Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory

Ever since Sidney Shapiro set foot on the land in 1947,he has an indissoluble bond with China.In order to present the real image of China to western readers,he devoted more than fifty years of his life time to translating Chinese literature.The translation of the red novel Daughters and Sons marks the beginning of the translation career of Shapiro.Meanwhile,it is the first red novel published in America.The translated text which was patronized by national institutes was firstly published in 1951 on the first issue of Chinese Literature.Foreign Languages Press off-printed it in 1958 and 1979.Shapiro himself contacted with the Liberty Book Club to publish the novel in 1952.As far as the Belgian pragmatist Jef Verschueren is concerned,the topics of traditional pragmatics have much in common.Therefore he put forward the pragmatic perspective;that is to say,the research scope of pragmatics should be extended to every possible level where language meanings are conveyed.He holds the idea that the process of using language is that language speakers make choices from a variety of variable possibilities in a flexible way so as to satisfy the communicative needs.Likewise,translation process consists of the continuous making of choices and adaptations.The translator should employ diversified translation methods to achieve the goal of adapting to the context of the target and source culture.This thesis,taking the adaptation theory as the theoretical framework,discusses how Shapiro,as the interpreter of the source text and utterer of the target text,makes two-dimensional adaptations.The analysis is carried out under the label of communicative context and linguistic context.At the communicative context level,the translator’s mental world,the social world of the source culture and the physical world of the target language is considered.With regard to the linguistic context,the adaptation at the syntactical level and the rearrangement of supersentential utterances at the discourse level is included.The thesis finds out that Shapiro’s firm political stance,bilingual and bicultural competence enables him to have a better understanding of the source text.He adopted different translation methods to make target readers have a better understanding of Chinese literature.In the source text,folk songs and proverbs are used to introduce every chapter.In terms of the adaptation to communicative context,he cuts them out for they leak what is about to follow.In addition,he deletes and rewrites repetitive and ambiguous dialogues.When translating culture-loaded words,temporal and spatial reference,he supplements the background information to fill the cultural vacancy of the target readers.Meanwhile,in order to achieve the translation intention of presenting a true and positive image of China,he strengthens communist heroic images by means of addition and omission.In terms of the adaptation to linguistic features of target language,he restructures the sentences and paragraphs at the discourse level.