The Adaptation And Selection Of Mongol Wolf In The Western World

Lang Tuteng,a novel by Jiang Rong,has been a publishing sensation in China.It exhibited strong sales almost immediately after its release in 2004,selling 2.4 million legal copies in China and topped China's bestseller list for 16 straight months.Lang Tuteng also attracted overseas publishers.Penguin Books purchased the book's global English copyright in 2005 from Changjiang Literature & Art Press with an advance of $100,000 and 10%royalties,setting a record for the highest amount ever paid for the translation rights to a Chinese book.Until now it has been translated into 26 languages including English,French,Italian,etc.The English version Wolf Totem,translated by Professor Howard Goldblatt,had won the first Man Asian Literary Prize half a year before its global launch in 2008 and won favorable comments from western newspapers and magazines such as The Guardian and National Geographic Traveler.Obviously,the English translation is also a great success.Since Lang Tuteng itself is a controversial long novel in China and its English version Wolf Totem has just been introduced to the world for just one year,by now, except for a few articles commenting on the original text or the translator's translation thoughts from a macro perspective,no research has been done on Howard Goldblatt's translation process of this specific novel.Survival of a translated work in the target market is directly due to its translator. However,translation studies had,for a long time,mainly taken a prescriptive model, focusing on the nature,criteria and techniques of translation,but obscuring the process and the translator,the most dynamic factor involved in the process.It was the "cultural turn" in translation studies in the west that the translator is discovered and an increasing attention is brought to the research on the subjectivity of the translator.Strongly inspired by modern ecological wave of "return to nature",Hu Gengshen introduced Darwin's principle of natural selection to translation studies and developed "an ecological approach to translation".Within the theoretical framework of translation as adaptation and selection,Hu defined the process of translating as "a selection activity of the translator's adaptation to fit the translational eco-environment".All the adaptation and selection in the translating process are due to the translator.They are interwoven and alternating.The translator adapts to the translational eco-environment by selection of the optimum and the principle of selection is survival of the fittest.Hu's approach provides us with a new and comprehensive perspective for studies on translation and translators.This thesis attempts to take Hu's approach as a tool,and the version translated by Goldblatt as the object,analyzes and compares the source text and the target text from the aspects of the translator's adaptation and selection in terms of needs,competence, and translational eco-environment.Thus to find the external reasons why this controversial novel attracted overseas publishers;the internal needs that Goldblatt chose to translate the novel;how he adapted to the original style,to western readers' psychology and cultural differences;and how he chose correspondent translating principles and strategies to reproduce the original text information into the target language.Hu Gengshen's approach to translation as adaptation and selection provides us with a new and comprehensive perspective for translation studies.The present thesis is a supplement to the study of Howard Goldblatt.Meanwhile,it can be used as a case study to prove the feasibility of Hu's approach.