An Analysis Of Ken Liu’s Translation Of The Three-body Problem From The Perspective Of Translation Variation Theory

China’s status of science fiction is enhanced with the improvement of China’s national strength.Science fiction and its translation will play significant roles in helping to make China’s culture and science and technology "go global".On the one hand,since 2016,the research on The Three-Body Problem has caught the attention of scholars nationally,with the keywords of "science fiction","Ken Liu","translation strategy","translator’s subjectivity," and "genre literature",mainly based on qualitative studies.From the literature review,the author has realized that contribution of translation theory is neglected in qualitative research,and systematic translation strategies are seldom selected for analysis.On the other hand,as a systematic translation theory,the variation theory’s twelve strategies have never been used to study The Three-Body Problem translation systematically.Professor Huang introduces seven variations:adding,deleting,editing,narrating,condensing,integrating,and altering.Based on these seven methods,Professor Huang Zhonglian put forward twelve translation variation strategies.Within the scope of translation variation theory,much research is on science and technology and tourism texts,but rarely on novels,so it is necessary to attempt to do novel translation research with the help of translation variation theory.Under the direction of this theory,this paper chooses three of the 12 strategies:edited translation,translation plus explanation and translation plus rewriting for analysis,to analyze the translation of The Three-Body Problem.The author would like to make documentary contributions to the study with the same theory by Professor Huang.This paper has five chapters.The first chapter introduces the research background,significance,objectives,and structure of this paper.The second one is a literature review of three aspects:the science fiction writer Liu Cixin,his novels,and the earlier study on the English translation of The Three-Body Problem.The third part chiefly presents the theoretical framework,including the general situation of variation theory and the research on variation theory.The fourth chapter is a case study that analyzes the English translation of The Three-Body Problem under the guidance of the translation variation theory.In this part,three strategies are selected to explore,including translation plus rewriting,translation plus explanation,and edited translation.Finally,this paper reviews the main findings and limitations in the fifth chapter and stretches some recommendations for upcoming exploration.