A Study Of Chinese Versions Of Resurrection From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Adaptation was originally a concept in biological evolution,and was later introduced into the study of pragmatics by the Belgian linguist Verschueren,and proposed the theory of language adaptation.The theory refers to a process in which a language user continuously selects in accordance with needs in a specific communicative context to achieve communicative purposes.The adaptation theory is rich in content,and the language can be examined in depth from the macro and micro aspects.Therefore,the theory has received extensive attention from the linguistic community since its inception.As a kind of intercultural communication behavior,translation itself is a process of language selection.Translators inevitably choose in the process of translation to achieve communicative purposes.Therefore,adaptation theory plays an important guiding role in translation.In view of this internal connection,applying the adaptation theory to the translation will undoubtedly enable the translator to understand the source text more accurately and choose the best translation strategy.As early as the beginning of the last century,China had a Chinese translation of "Resurrection".So far,there have been more than 20 Chinese translations of "Resurrection",but the most popular ones are the Ru Long's and the Cao Ying's translation.This is also the original intention of this paper to select these two translations as research objects.First of all,this paper elaborates on the theory of adaptation and discusses its guiding significance to translation.The adaptation theory mainly includes three linguistic attributes of variability,negotiation and adaptability,as well as four research perspectives: contextual correlates,structural objects,the dynamics of adaptability and salience of the adaptation.Secondly,a brief analysis of the literary work "Resurrection" and the two translations selected in this article.Finally,it is mainly based on the two Chinese translations of "Resurrection".From the four research perspectives of adaptation theory,it discusses how the translator chooses and adapts in the process of translation,including lexical semantics,syntactic structure,linguistic rhetoric,space environment,social occasions,character's emotions,cultural concepts and many other aspects,it can be seen that adaptationtheory has a strong explanatory power for literary translation.