An Eco-translatological Perspective On Jeffrey Kinkley’ English Translation Of Bian Cheng

Eco-translatology is a home-born translation theory, adopting Darwin’s principle "Natural selection, survival of the fittest", not only proposes a new interpretation for the nature, process, criteria and methods of translation from the aspects of "adaption" and "selection", but also argues and builds the theory of translational adaptation and selection. After going through the linguistic turn and cultural turn successively, the translation study is undergoing anther turn—the ecological turn. The development of Eco-translatology has lasted for a decade’s development, and the theory itself is undergoing continuous improvement.Eco-translatology provides a brand new angle for translation studies. Under the guidance of eco-translatology, this paper is to analyze " Border Town" by Jeffery Kinkley from the ecological perspective to testify eco-translatology’s interpretation power of the translating process.Through categorizations and analyses of terms such as "eco-translatology","translational eco-environment","selective adaptation" and "adaptive selection", this thesis tries to test the applicability of eco-translatology to the analysis of The Border Town. The present thesis makes a tentative study of Jeffery Kinkley’s translation of Border Town by Shen Congwen from the two stages of adaptation and selection with eco-translatological theory. On the adaptation stage, the thesis tries to explain the translator’s adaptation from the aspects of translational environment, eco-text environment, the translator’s bilingual competence and etc.. And on selection stage, the analysis of the translator’s adaptive selection and transformation will be made from linguistic dimension, cultural dimension and communicative dimension. Linguistic dimensional selection is carried out from lexical, syntactic and rhetorical levels. Cultural dimensional selection mainly concentrates on how the translator deals with the cultural-loaded words with different translational strategiesThe research proves that the interpreting of the English version Border Town by Jeffery Kinkley is completely feasible, and the success of the translation&acceptability by target readers was the production of Jeffery Kinkley’s active adaptation to the "translational eco-environment". However, it also occurred for me to find out the shortcomings and limitations, such as in the actual translating process, it is impossible to analyze "adaptation" and "selection" separately because these two parts have many overlaps. In this way, the further study of eco-translatology is quite necessary for its own improvement and perfection. This paper, under the guidance of eco-translatology, through the analysis of the English version of Shen Congwen’s Bian Cheng translated by Jeffery Kinkley from the aspect of eco-transtatology, proves the analyzing power of eco-translatology of the translating process.