Analysis Of The Translator's Subjectivity In The English Version Of Sandalwood Death From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

With the rapid development of all aspects of China,Chinese literature shines on the international stage.As the first winner of Nobel Prize in Literature in China,Mo Yan contributed a lot.As an excellent and prolific writer,Mo Yan has created many literary works of great research value.Sandalwood Death is one of his long masterpieces,mainly talking about a cruel execution case in Gaomi County,Shandong Province in the early 19 th century.After the Sandalwood Death translated by Howard Goldblatt was published in 2013,it has attracted scholars' great attention.Many scholars have studied it from various angles.This thesis attempts to study the translator's subjectivity of the translation of Sandalwood Death from the perspective of adaptation theory.Adaptation theory mainly includes four research dimensions,namely contextual adaptation,structural adaptation,dynamic adaptation and salience of adaptation.Based on their relationship,salience of adaptation process plays the dominant role among the four investigation angles and it controls the other three angles.In other words,salience of adaptation process decides on the dynamics of adaptation and it further decides on contextual and structural adaptation because structural adaptation,and contextual adaptation are the concrete manifestation and contents of salience of adaptation process.This thesis just focuses on two angles: structural adaptation and contextual adaptation.Adaptation theory also points out that the use of language is a process of continuous choice making.Translation activities are a kind of language use and translators must make choices in the process of translation after considering many factors.Those choices not only reflect the translator's initiative and creativity,but also demonstrate the translator's adaptation to the target language and the target readers.This research also provides a different perspective for the study of literary translation.In order to study the translator's subjectivity in translating Sandalwood Death from the perspective of adaptation theory,the author compares the differences between the Chinese and English versions of Sandalwood Death and collects the samples that can reflect the translator's subjectivity and classifies them from the perspective of adaptation theory.They are mainly structural adaptation and contextual adaptation.In this thesis,structural adaptation is mainly reflected at the rhythm,lexical in Maoqiang opera.Contextual adaptation is mainly exhibited in the communicative context,idioms social customs,religious beliefs and ideology in cultural environment are all involved.Through specific analysis,the research finds that the translator,Goldblatt,makes full use of the translator's subjective consciousness and creativity in the process of translation,and employs different translation strategies to deal with the differences caused by cultural diversity in order to adapt to the level of structural adaptation and dynamic adaptation.It not only conforms to the language environment of the target language as well as achieve the dynamic effects,but also adapts to the target readers' cognition and meets their reading expectations.These adaptations improve the acceptance and readability of the translated text.This thesis studies the translator's subjectivity in literary translation works from the perspective of adaptation theory,which not only emphasizes that the translator,as an independent individual,should fully exert the subjective consciousness on translation activities to translate high-quality translation works,but also highlights that adaptation plays an important role in evaluating the quality of translation works.