A Report On The Translation Of Records Of Streets And Alleys In Chengdu (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Adaptation Theory

With the development of the city,everything in the old town gradually disappeared from the public eye.To record the changes of Chengdu’s old city,Yuan Tingdong,a famous expert on Bashu culture,wrote the book Records of Streets and Alleys in Chengdu,which records the streets and alleys as well as the celebrities’ anecdotes of the old city.The translator selects the pages from 634 to 652 of the book for translation.This paper is a summary and analysis of this translation process.The language style of the source text is plain,and straightforward.At the same time,it also cites several ancient Chinese poems,which makes the article objective and literary.However,this also brings some difficulties to the translation.Meanwhile,the source text contains a large number of place names.The sentences in the text are mostly long with complex structures.In order to make the translation conform to the thinking habits of the target language readers,the translator chooses the Pragmatic Adaptation Theory as the guiding theory to guide the whole translation process.As the source text belongs to informative text,the author’s primary purpose is to popularize Chengdu culture to the readers.Therefore,the main focus of the translation text is the accuracy of information transmission.In the process of translation,the translator is faithful to the original information,based on respectively from four aspects,namely: contextual adaptation,structural adaptation,dynamic adaptation,and the salience of translation process.In the face of different translation objects,the translator takes different translation methods such as conversion,addition,omission and annotation in the translation process.Under the guidance of pragmatic adaptation theory,the translator makes flexible adaptation choices in terms of words,syntactic structure,and discourse cohesion to make the target readers have the same reading experience as the original readers to achieve the communicative purpose.Simultaneously,the translator also hopes that the translation practice guided by this theory can bring some enlightenment to the translation of similar texts.