A Comparative Study On The Three Chinese Versions Of Jane Eyre From The Approach To Translation As Adaptation And Selection

Since it was translated by Li Jiye into Chinese in the 1930s, Jane Eyre has become a household novel of English literature to the Chinese readers. In the following eight decades, there appeared around 100 Chinese versions of Jane Eyre (including the absolute translation, selective translation, translation with reconstruction and bilingual versions). Among them, Li Jiye's, Zhu Qingying's and Huang Yuanshen's versions have stood out for their unique significance and appeal. Li Jiye's version is the first complete Chinese version and the only complete one until 1980. Zhu Qingying's version is the first version after China's Reform and Opening-up, whose overall sales volume has exceeded three million copies and is still loved by the Chinese readers. Meanwhile Huang Yuanshen's version receives mostly the readers'favorable feedback and has been widely commented by scholars among all the versions produced in the 1990s. It is in view of this that the present paper selects these three versions as the subject of the study.In China, it has always been a hot topic to conduct studies on the translation of Jane Eyre in the field of translation studies. Especially in recent years, translation studies on the translations of Jane Eyre have become an important aspect of literary translation studies, among which there are comparative studies focusing on two versions, or even on four versions. However, there are few studies that make a comparative study of the three versions mentioned above. In view of this, the present paper attempts to make a comparative study on the three Chinese versions of Jane Eyre based on the Approach to Translation as Adaptation and Selection in an effort to explore their respective degree of holistic adaptation and selection from the perspective of multi-dimensional transformation, reader feedback and translator quality.The study reveals that Li Jiye's, Zhu Qingying's and Huang Yuanshen's versions embody the characteristics of their times respectively, which are the outcome of the translator's adaptation and selection in his/her translational eco-environment. From the perspective of linguistic dimension, Li Jiye selected the lexical and syntactic forms of his time, which is adaptive to the readers of his period. However, owing to the development and changes of the Chinese language, the Europeanized lexical and syntactic forms with strong ideological color make it very difficult for his version to survive in nowadays translational eco-environment. By contrast, Zhu's version, though containing some Europeanized sentences and influenced by the ideology of the 1960s and 70s, adapts itself to the readers in the 1980s because she selected the modern standardized words and structures. Besides, in order to adapt to her translational eco-environment, she made a great number of annotations, raising the possibility of her translation's survival in the Natural Selection. Whereas Huang Yuanshen in the 1990s adopted domestication and provided the appropriate annotations for cultural elements to meet the reader's aesthetic need, which is Huang's intended strategy for adapting to the translational eco-environment.In addition, through the comparative study on the three Chinese versions of Jane Eyre and the translators' adaptive selection, the paper has also found that the scope of the second stage of the two stages of adaption and selection in translation process should be broadened. Especially in the retranslation activity, it should include the existing version. The paper proposes this idea, expecting to provide some limited help to the researchers who are interested in this theory and its application.