Selection And Adaptation In Diachronic Retranslations

With the development of translation studies and the upsurge of retranslations, literary retranslation,as an important translation phenomenon,gains increasing popularity among translators and researchers both at home and abroad. Retranslation-related studies in the past,however,are prescriptive.Such a conventional paradigm of prescription is mainly confined to the specific shifts at the linguistic level, with emphasis on linguistic comparison between different versions.The shortcoming of this approach lies in the fact that many translation researches are only focused on the factors at the language-internal level.So many language-external factors such as social background,translators' intentions,readers' expectations and cognitive abilities are ignored.Therefore,translation,especially literary translation,has been regarded as a merely linguistic transfer or literal reproduction by researchers in translation studies for a long time.To some extent,this kind of static and one-sided research method restricts the development of translation studies and is unable to explain the literary retranslation objectively and thoroughly.Fortunately,"Cultural Turn" in the past decades brought some new concepts to translation studies.To observe literary retranslation,the paper introduces a new descriptive paradigm,which is quite different from the conventional prescriptive approach.Descriptive translation studies break out the limit of pure text and regard translation as a cultural and historical phenomenon;thus translation is treated in target-oriented social and cultural environment,involving the relationship between translation and target culture.In this sense,the comparative study on different versions is not to find errors in the translations or to make any judgment on which version is superior to the other,but to find the differences between the versions and the underlying factors determining translators' strategies.We can not assess the target text in an isolated and static way without considering the communicative context in which the language is used,either.Then,how to explain why different translators create different versions with different styles by selecting different translation strategies when translating the same original text,and why these versions are all popular with the readers of different historical periods? Can we find out a suitable theory to explain the necessity of literary retranslation?In the past twenty years,especially in the 80's and 90's of the 20^th century when pragmatics sprang up and rapidly developed,it provided translation studies with a new perspective.Jef Verschueren(1999) put forward a pragmatic perspective on language and Adaptation Theory to explore the issues of language use.He uses selection and adaptation to describe the process of language use,and his thought provides a new angle and a descriptive tool for our examination of translation.Under the framework of Adaptation Theory,translation can be said to be a dynamic process of selection and adaptation.The discussion of selection and adaptation in the process of translation is presented at two levels,namely,the language-internal level and the language-external level.In this way,such issues as why the different translators adopt different strategies and the necessity and rationality of the retranslation,can be properly explained.In order to make this study more convincing,a detailed comparative study is conducted between the two versions of Tess of the d'Urbervilles in different periods of time.The comparison is made at both language-internal and language-external levels and takes temporal dimension into consideration so as to make a relatively comprehensive study on the diachronic retranslation.In conclusion,the author holds that translation is a continuous and dynamic process of selection and adaptation.The target text is the product of translator's selection and adaptation.Translators can adopt certain translation strategies in a flexible way for adaptation.A translation should not be simply viewed as good or bad if only from a static and absolute viewpoint since the process of selection and adaptation is dynamic.An appropriate translation should possess the highest degree of adaptation to the linguistic structures,social background, translation intentions and readers' expectations,etc. This thesis takes advantage of Verschueren's theory to explore specific issues of translation.Under the framework of Adaptation Theory,process of translation can be studied with the comprehensive investigation into both language-internal and language-external factors,which has something different from the conventional studies merely focused on linguistic transfer.