A Study On Linguistic Landscape From The Perspective Of Eco-Translatology

With the rapid development of globalization,a good number of translation theories from abroad have been introduced into China.Chinese scholars learned foreign studies and applied into their own research,and at the same time,they never g ave up st udying their own ones.Eco-Translatology,proposed by domestic scholar professor Hu Gengshen at the beginning of this century,is an eco-translation paradigm of translation studies from ecological perspectives.Upon translation principles,Eco-Translatology states the “multi-dimensional selective adaptation and ad aptive selection”.On the one hand,it e mphasizes on “multi-dimensional adaptation”;on the other hand,it focuses on making an adaptive selection to adjust translational eco-environment.In Ec o-Translatology,the translation approaches are concluded into “three-dimensional transformation,namely the linguistic dimension,culture dimension and communication dimension”.The term “linguistic landscape” was first proposed by Rodrigue Landry and Richard Y.Bourhis.The studies on linguistic landscape are developing rapidly and draw increasing attention nowadays,but the research is still in the initial stage in China.It is obvious that Chinese scholars still focus on exploring the translation strategies on the public signs as a linguistic landscape study in order to improve the quality of translation for the common goal of “building a good international image” and “strength international communication”.In fact,there were lots of discussions about the correction of the translation on street signs,while the appropriation of the sign translation is still limited and restricted in some aspects and few researchers examined the linguistic landscape in multilingual area fro m an Eco-Translatological perspective.With the Eco-Translatology as the t heoretical framework,this study explores the tra nslation phenomena of Linguistic landscape,taking the Boston Chinatown as a study case.Quantitative method is conducted to get the overview of language characteristics in Boston Chinatown,and descriptive method is adopted to describe the translation phenomena and translational eco-environments in Boston Chinatown.After that,this thesis conducts blended methods,such as descriptive method,rapid anonymous survey method and interview method to analyze the translators' adaptive selection from three dimensions with some typical C-E and E-C translation cases.The thesis is div ided into four pa rts to answ er research questions.First,t he translational eco-environment is discussed form bilingual environment and target reader.Because eco-environment plays a critical role of deciding the direction of translation,it provides the foundation to discuss how the translation of LL in Boston Chinatown adapts to the eco-environment.Next,through analyzing transliteration,literal translation and liberal translation of LL in Boston Chinatown from the linguistic perspective,it is concluded that it adapts to the translational eco-environment from the linguistic dimension.Through anonymous rapid survey and analysis of the examples,the informative function is realized.That means the translation of LL in Boston Chinatown adapts to the eco-environment from the communicative view and the description method and interview method are used to show how the translations of LL in Boston Chinatown adapt to the eco-environment from cultural dimension.Through above analysis,it ca n be concluded that the translation of LL i n Boston Chinatown adapts to t he eco-environment from the perspective of three dimensions.This thesis provides a new perspective for exploring translation activities.It focuses on translators “adaptation and selection” in a translational eco-environment and believes that the Eco-Translatology,a macroscopic view of approach,can be applied into translation studies of linguistic landscape.