A Study On The C-E Translation Of Figures Of Speech In The Peony Pavilion From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Regarded as Tang Xianzu’s greatest achievement,The Peony Pavilion boasts a large number of figures of speech,known as a treasure house of rhetoric.These figures of speech contain rich connotations of the Chinese culture,so they bring translators great challenges in the process of the translation.This script is also faced with the dilemma of cross-cultural exchange.As a result,under the background of Chinese culture going global,it is of great importance to study the translation strategies and methods of figures of speech in Chinese classical drama.Adaptation theory,proposed by Verschueren,a Belgian linguist,regards language use as a process of constant choice-making in order to adapt to different communicative environments.It is believed that the adaptation of language use can be evaluated from four dimensions: contextual correlates of adaptability,structural objects of adaptability,dynamics of adaptability and salience of the adaptation process.Contextual correlates of adaptability include adaptation to the physical world,the social world and the mental world.Structural objects of adaptability include adaptation at the lexical level and the syntactical level.As a complex activity of language use,the translation of figures of speech is also a process of dynamic adaptation at different levels of language.Therefore,adaptation theory can be used to guide and interpret the translation of figures of speech.This thesis takes eleven types of figures of speech in The Peony Pavilion as research object,including allusion,simile,metaphor,personification,metonymy,pun,hyperbole,reduplicated word,repetition,parallelism and antithesis.Based on the English version of The Peony Pavilion by Wang Rongpei,this thesis builds the corpus of the translation of figures of speech and conducts a detailed study on the translation strategies and methods of these figures of speech from the perspective of adaptation theory.By adopting both literature research method and method of induction,this thesis draws a tentative conclusion.As for the translation of figures of speech in The Peony Pavilion,the domestication strategy is mainly applied to realize adaptation in structural objects and contextual correlates.(1)In terms of structural adaptation,the methods of free translation and omission are primarily chosen to render reduplicated word,which realizes adaptability at the lexical level.The methods of literal translation and amplification are mainly employed to deal with repetition.The methods,such as literal translation,free translation,amplification,omission and conversion are adopted to translate parallelism and antithesis,which achieves adaptability at the syntactical level.(2)In terms of contextual adaptation,the methods of free translation and omission are frequently employed to render allusion,which conforms to the social world of the target readers.The methods,like free translation,literal translation and literal translation plus free translation are often used to deal with simile,metaphor and personification.Free translation is chiefly applied to translate metonymy and hyperbole.The methods of free translation and amplification are mostly adopted to render pun,which adapts to the mental world of the target readers.At the same time,this thesis hopes to enrich researches on the English version of The Peony Pavilion and offer some reference for the translation of figures of speech of Chinese classics.Furthermore,Chinese classical drama culture can be better promoted in other countries.