David E.pollard's Adaptation And Selection Strategies For Translating Classical Chinese Essays

Classical Chinese essays,just like classical Chinese fiction,poetry and drama,boast a long history and excellent craft.They can all be seen as gems of Chinese literature.However,much less attention has been paid to classical Chinese essay translation than to classical Chinese fiction and poetry translation,whether in terms of practice or research.As a result,little systematic and in-depth research has been done.Given this fact,it's hard to have a comprehensive understanding of classical Chinese essay translation and even harder to establish a knowledge system in this field.The Chinese Essay,translated and edited by the British sinologist David E.Pollard,is well accepted among readers and scholars at home and abroad for the refined translations in it.It includes translations of 29 classical Chinese essays representative of the genre.And little systematic or in-depth research has been done on them yet.Therefore,in order to make up for this gap,the author makes an attempt to do a relatively systematic study of David E.Pollard's translations of classical Chinese essays,using the Approach to Translation as Adaptation and Selection.The thesis is aimed at finding out how the translator can adapt and select when translating classical Chinese essays.It gives a description of and makes an analysis of the adaptation and selection strategies Pollard adopts in the linguistic,cultural and communicative dimensions.The major findings are as follows:(1)In the linguistic dimension,Pollard mainly chooses to adapt to the the source text(ST henceforward),tries to reproduce its lexical features through diction and figures of speech,reserves the two major syntactic features of the ST,symmetry and conciseness,in the target text(TT henceforward)and uses addition,fusion and unifying devices to improve cohesion in the TT;(2)In the cultural dimension,Pollard mainly chooses to adapt to target readers,and selects such approaches as explanatory translation,literal translation,transliteration and annotation to deal with cultural matters in the ST;(3)In the communicative dimension,Pollard chooses to adapt to the communicative intention of the ST,and selects the communicative approaches to convey the communicative intention in the TT.In whichever dimension,Pollard manages to strike a balance between the world of the source text/language and the world of the target language/readers and thus produce satisfactory translations.This research is expected to provide guidance for future classical Chinese essay translation practices,and contribute to classical Chinese essay translation research as well.