A Study On The English Translation Of A Dictionary Of Maqiao By Julia Lovell From The Perspective Of Eco-Translatology

Maqiao Cidian is the representative work of the Chinese contemporary writer Han Shaogong,which has gained a lot of attention since it came out.Based on his own experience in his youth when he was dispatched to the rural area in the west of Hunan Province as an“Educated Youth”during the Cultural Revolution,Han Shaogong creatively fictionalized a remote poor tiny village in the west part of Hunan called“Maqiao”in the form of dictionary,combining several different other literary forms inside such as novel,memoirs,short essays.With the introduction to the dialectical language,customs,and daily life of the inhabitants of the village,the author presents the tragedies of individuals and groups of people caused by the special historical period.It should be noted that even though the author seems to focus on the tiny village Maqiao,its dialects and the inhabitants,his vision and thoughts are not confined within the narrow sphere of the village or even the broad sphere of the Country of China.Each entry in his dictionary embodies the author's serious thoughts on language,culture,human nature,and the current society.Meanwhile the author's courageous creative art experiment offers new possibility for literary creation.In 2003,the English translation of this novel was completed by the English sinologist and translator Julia Lovell and was published by the Columbia University Press.Julia Lovell's successful translation has pushed Han Shaogong and his work on the international stage.After that,the novel has been translated into many other languages and has won a lot of awards of various kinds.As we all know,for a certain literary work,no matter what language it is translated into,the important position and great value of the source work and its original author can not be denied at all.Nevertheless,whether the work can survive in the target language eco-environment and whether it can be accepted by target readers widely or not depend largely on the quality of the translation and the translator's competence to adapt to the complex translational eco-environment.With the Eco-Translatology theory as its framework,the present thesis conducts a comparative study on the novel Maqiao Cidian and Julia Lovell's translation A Dictionary of Maqiao.The author of the thesis mainly analyzes the translator's translation from two aspects:the translator's selective adaption,and her adaptive selection in the translation process.For the former,the discussion centers around the translator's adaptation to the translational eco-environment based on her own motivation and bi-cultural and bi-lingual competence when selecting the source text in the process of translation.While for the latter,the author examines Julia Lovell's translation from linguistic,cultural,and communicative dimensions to find out how the translator makes adaptive selections from the three dimensions.In this part,the author focuses on the linguistic transformation and gives a detailed analysis of the translation at different linguistic levels such as phonological level,lexical level,syntactic level,and rhetorical level.The present research finds that the thematic meaning,language style,and the aesthetic value of the original work have been faithfully represented to a large degree owing to the translator's surfficient preparatory work and research before translation,full understanding of the original work,skillful use of various translation methods and techniques.Meanwhile several inappropriate translations due to the translator's ignorance of the creative language use and rhetorical devices of the original work have been point out.The present thesis also concludes some translation strategies for representing language style of the original work,such as literal translation,dynamic imitation,analogous translating explanation and restructuring.It is proposed in the thesis that the crucial presupposition for the translation of contemporary Chinese literary works to be widely accepted in the Western culture is the readability of the translated work,which may offer helpful reference for translation practice.The author points out that the researches and studies of the translation of contemporary Chinese literature should.not be confined with the single dimensional evaluative analysis based on“equivalence”between the source text and the target text,but should be analyzed and evaluated holistically against the global background of the translational eco-environment as a whole.