On The Translation Of Chinese Auditory Verbs From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

The sense of hearing serves as an essential way for human beings to receive the outside information and acquire the knowledge.Accordingly,auditory verb comes to be one of the essential language categories in Chinese.At present,the studies of Chinese auditory verb mainly focus on the cognitive and semantic analysis and few efforts are exerted to the translation studies,which deserve more attention.It aims to figure out the English correspondence of the Chinese auditory verb,analyze the main translation techniques and methods employed by the translators and the factors that influence the choice-making of different translators during the translation of Chinese auditory verbs.A comparative study is conducted between the Chinese auditory verbs and their English translations with the help of the corpus of CCL.There follows a comparison of Chinese auditory verbs in Selected Stories of Lu Hsun and its three well-accepted English versions by Lyell,Yang Hsien-yi and his wife Gladys Yang and Lovell respectively with the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods in light of Verschueren’s adaptation theory.The findings are as follows:the translation techniques used in translating Chinese auditory verbs are divided into three types:Direct transfer,Modification and Omission.A Direct transfer refers to a case of translation in which the Chinese auditory verb is translated as an English auditory verb as its correspondence.A Modification refers to a case of translation in which the Chinese auditory verb is translated as other linguistic form as its correspondence.An Omission refers to a case of translation in which no linguistic form is visible as the correspondence of the Chinese auditory verb after translation.Comparing the three versions of Selected Stories of Lu Hsun,at the macro contextual level,differences between the thinking modes of Chinese and westerners result in the adaptations during the translation of Chinese auditory verbs;at the micro structural level,differences between the Chinese and English language structures primarily lie at the textual level,syntactic level and lexical level.In general,all the three translators make adaptations to achieve the communicative purposes,which can be testified by the employment of the technique of omission in their translations of Chinese auditory verbs.The frequencies of the use of omission in the three versions reflect the degree of adaptation to the ST:Lovell’s version>Yang’s version>Lyell’s version,which can be manifested in the two perspectives:a)auditory verbs,expressing the perception of the human beings,have a strong subjective consciousness.The omission of auditory verbs in the ST weakens the subjectivity and strengthen the objectivity of the TT,which adapts to the objective-minded thinking mode of the target readers,b)auditory verbs usually describe the approach and process of an event.The omission of auditory verbs,neglecting the description of the process,realizes the adaptation to the result-oriented pragmatic principle of the target language.Therefore,the technique of omission is recommended to be adopted during the translation of Chinese auditory verbs on the basis of differences between Chinese and English at the macro context level and the micro structural level.This thesis is making an endeavor,both theoretically and practically,to provide some reference for the translation of Chinese auditory verbs.It hopes to be beneficial and enlightening to the translation theory and practice in the future.