An Eco-Translatological Study On Allan Hepburn Barr’s English Translation Of The Seventh Day

The Seventh Day is one of Yu Hua’s representative works.After being translated by British sinologist Allan Hepburn Barr,the English version of the book was published in 2015 and received high praise from overseas readers.However,there exist few researches on Barr and the Seventh Day both at home and abroad.And conducting more researches on them will enrich translator researches,and provide some suggestions for the dissemination of Chinese literature overseas.Eco-Translatology holds that translation is a process in which translators make adaptations and selections continuously in the translational eco-environment,which is an effective way to study the central role of translators in translation activities.In light of this,this paper takes the Seventh Day and its English translation as the research object,and uses EcoTranslatology as the theoretical framework to explore the central role of Allan Hepburn Barr in the translation process.This paper is divided into three chapters.The first chapter discusses the translator’s“selective adaptation” to the translational eco-environment.The translator takes the central role throughout the translation process,which is firstly reflected in the translator’s selection of the source text.The second chapter is about the translator’s“adaptive selection”.It means that the translator,on the basis of adapting to the translational eco-environment,applies his or her subjectivity,flexibly chooses the translation strategies,and carries out “multi-dimensional” transformations.Moreover,an extra aesthetic dimension is added to the analysis of the text.In the aesthetic dimension,the translators reproduce the rhetorical and contextual beauty of the source text.The third chapter evaluates the translation work from three aspects: the degree of multi-dimensional transformation,readers’ feedback and translator quality.This paper finds that the English translation of the Seventh Day has been a great success in that the translator has comprehensively adapted to the translation ecoenvironment,including the style of the source text,linguistic characteristics,as well as the cultural background of the target language,readers’ expectations and other typically important components.And the selection of the source text and translation strategy reflect the adaptive selection,fully reflecting Barr’s central position in translating the Seventh Day.The research significance of this paper lies in that there exist few studies on the English translation of the Seventh Day,especially from the perspective of the translator,thus this paper provides a new perspective and sheds some light on the translation of contemporary literature.The theoretical significance is that it demonstrates the feasibility of the aesthetic dimension in literary texts,and enriches the theoretical framework of Eco-Translatology.