The Analysis About The Three Chinese Versions Of Anne Of Green Gables From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

In1999, Verschueren put forward the theory of adaptation.“Selection” and “adaptation”are used to describe the process of language use. Verschueren makes a proposal that usinglanguage is composed of “the continuous making of linguistic choices, consciously orunconsciously, for language—internal and/or language—external reasons”. Translation canalso be seen as a special process of using language. In children’s literature translation,translators tend to consciously or unconsciously make choices to express the author’s meaningand intentions, and cater to children readers according to the characteristics of children’sliterature.Verschueren’s adaptation theory has built a pragmatic framework of the coherence andunity of translation. Anne of Green Gables has won great popularity among young readers offrom all levels of society since its publication. This paper attempts to employ the adaptationtheory to the study of children’s literature translation. The author chooses many samples tomake a comparison of the study among the three Chinese versions of this novel, including thelinguistic adaptation (lexical, syntactic and discourse level), contextual adaptation (linguistic,social-cultural and communicative context), and dynamic dimension adaptation.After the comparative analysis，the author believes that the three translators all considertheir respective social background and children in different time and they make choices andadaptation during the process of translation. The three versions all won their own perfecttranslation effect and popularity.In conclusion, children readers are one of the most important elements which can affectthe translators to make choices and adapt the language and context in target language in termsof the style of linguistics, children’s mental world, social world and physical world. Onlybecause of this, the translations can be accepted by children and achieve its success.This research proves that the Adaptation Theory has a strong practical and adaptivepower to children’s literature translation. It can help improve the quality of children’sliterature translation works, supply new thoughts to children’s translation criticism andmeanwhile provide reference and to translating the literary works.