Translation Strategies Of Decoded: A Novel From The Perspective Of Eco-translatology

Decoded: A Novel composed by Mai Jia,the noted Chinese writer,has been honored with National Books Award of China and Mao Dun Literature Awards.As one of contemporary Chinese works,it has been widely spread abroad.Its success is not only due to the charm of the work itself,but also due to the translators who co-translated the novel.They adopt flexible translation strategies,not only paying attention to the reading habits of the target readers,but also retaining the Chinese elements of Decoded: A Novel and the cultural gene and aesthetic way.At present,the translation studies of Decoded: A Novel in domestic literature mainly focus on reception theory,intertextuality theory,polysystem theory,Hermeneutics theory and construal theory.This paper attempts to study translation strategies of Decoded: A Novel through the three-dimensional principle of Eco-translatology proposed by Professor Hu Gengshen of Tsinghua University.Different from other translation theories,Eco-translatology does not struggle between “literal or free translation” and “domestication or foreignization”;instead it emphasizes on translators’ adaptation and selection under the macro eco-environment.Consequently,this paper mainly concentrates on the following two aspects:the first one is the translational eco-environment of Decoded: A Novel;the second one is the translator’s adaptive selection and transformation of the target text based on his adaptation to the translational eco-environment.Through the methods of document retrieval and text analysis,this paper analyzes the English translation of Decoded: A Novel from linguistic,cultural and communicative dimensions.It mainly introduces the macro-and micro-environment of Decoded: A Novel.Firstly,the source-language ecology and the target-language ecology constitute the macro eco-environment of Decoded: A Novel.Secondly,the translator plays a major role in the micro eco-environment,adapting and selecting the source text,and realizing the balance between the source-language ecology and the target-language ecology.As far as the translation itself is concerned,this paper discusses the translation strategies adopted by the translator in the specific context from linguistic,cultural and communicative dimensions.From linguistic dimension,translators should pay attention to the transformation of language forms;from cultural dimension,the adaptive transformation requires translators should focus on the differences between the source-language culture and the target-language culture;from communicative dimension,the translator should pay attention to the communicative intention of the target language and source language.At the same time,this paper verifies the guiding significance of Eco-translatology to the study of translation process with a hope that this study can enrich the study of the English version of Decoded: A Novel and bring some inspiration to the translation of Chinese literature.