A Critical Commentary On The E-C Translation Of Raising Families:Sperm Whales

Life under the sea is colorful,and the sea is not only the nurturer,but also the bond to the world.On the way to the pursuit of a human community with a shared future,it is also a necessity to the pursuit of human and maritime community with a shared future.Therefore,to protect maritime environment is to protect human’s living environment,and protecting non-humans and maintaining biodiversity in oceans become the most urgent at present.Influenced by such conditions,Raising Families:Sperm Whales,the first realm of Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families,Create Beauty,and Achieve Peace is selected as a translation object,in an attempt to make a sharp increase in readership in virtue of the E-C translation,arousing readers’ attention to oceans and lives within.In the translation as adaptation and selection,translation is a process of both selective adaptation and adaptative selection to the translational eco-environment.The translator,however,regards translation as a course of selective adaptation to elements of the translational eco-environment,that is,the translator’s selective adaptation to the target reader,target text and source text(hereafter,TR,TT and ST).In this way,the E-C translation is proceeded,including how the translation activity is progressed,and what translation strategies have been adopted to tackle with translation difficulties present in translation from the perspective of selective adaptation.Primarily,the arrangement of pre-translation,in-translation and post-translation will be introduced,and then various translation strategies will be displayed after adapting to the translational eco-environment selectively with translation difficulties addressed,such as four-character phrases,part of speech conversion,polysemy,amplification,simplification,deep and surface transformation,recomposition,repetition,dash and italics reduction,shifting points of view,etc.in consideration of selective adaptation to lexis,syntax,context as well as communicative intention.In the translation,translators are performers and subjects of selective adaptation,which means translating is a combination of translators’ subjectivity and objectivity.Therefore,translators should be aware of their responsibilities and obligations,selecting STs suitable to their capabilities and fitful into core values in China and beyond.Simultaneously,translators should be familiar with lifestyles of the translational environment,having a good understanding of different cultures.At last,translators must realize diverse translation strategies and function as bridges to narrow the gap between STs and TTs,as well as source authors(hereafter,SAs)and TRs.