A Study On The Translation Additions Of Legends Of The Condor Heroes I: A Hero Born

Legends of the Condor Heroes,the first novel of Louis Cha’s “Trilogy of Shooting Condor”,is deeply loved by readers of different ages because of its prominent historical background,impressive scenes and distinctive “heroic epic” style.Over sixty years later,the first volume of the English translation of the classic martial arts novel: A Hero Born,translated by Swedish translator Anna Holmwood,was released as the first English translation,which gained favorable reputation from main media and western readers.The translation strategies adopted by Holmwood in A Hero Born are indispensable to its success,and the most important one is her reasonable application of the translation additions.Therefore,summarizing Holmwood’s successful experience of adopting translation additions in her translation process of A Hero Born has an inspiration meaning to facilitate Chinese culture’s “going global”,especially the martial arts culture.However,few translation studies have ever conducted on this best-selling translation,and even fewer people have ever touched upon the translator’s additions in it.This thesis uses Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory as a framework,discussing the translation additions in the Legends of the Condor Heroes I: A Hero Born,which aims to solve the following three problems: 1.What are the categories of the additions in Legends of the Condor Heroes I: A Hero Born? 2.Why did the translator make some additions when translating Legends of the Condor Heroes I: A Hero Born? 3.What are the implications of the addition strategy for Chinese culture’s “going global”,especially the martial arts culture?This thesis finds that the additions in Legends of the Condor Heroes I: A Hero Born can be divided into two categories: additions of contextual correlates of adaptability and additions of structural objects of adaptability.The translator took aesthetic tendency,social conventions,religious beliefs and language norms into consideration,significantly reducing reader’s cognitive cost,which brings great revelations to the translation practice of Chinese martial arts novels in the future: since Chinese martial arts novels,which bearunique national characteristics,are deeply grounded in traditional culture,translators are supposed to consider not only the faithfulness of the text,but also how to adopt translation strategies in a proper way in their translation process,minimizing cognitive burden of readers,only in this way can Chinese martial arts novels “go global” smoothly.