A Comparative Study On Two Chinese Versions Of The Moon And Sixpence From The Perspective Of Translation Evaluation Criteria Of Eco-Translatology

Since 1960 s,human civilization has moved from the industrial civilization to a new development stage where the concept of “ecology” began to enter different research fields.The translation circles have witnessed the appearance of China’s localized translation theoretical system,namely Eco-Translatology,which proposes a holistic research of translation from the brand-new ecological perspective.The translation evaluation criteria of Eco-Translatology consist of three reference indicators,namely the degree of multi-dimensional transformations,readers’ feedback,and the translator’s quality.Most of the previous translation evaluation criteria only focus on the quality of the translation itself,and some also involve readers’ feedback,but hardly mention the translator’s quality.For this reason,the translation evaluation criteria of Eco-Translatology are more comprehensive and objective.As a full-length novel written by the British novelist William Somerset Maugham,The Moon and Sixpence was published in 1919.Following its publication,the novel has been popular in the world.In recent years,many of its Chinese versions have emerged on the market,among which Fu Weici’s version appeared much early with its earliest publication in 1981.And Fu’s version has been published for many editions.Li Jihong’s version,however,is the most controversial one with its first publication in 2016.At present,there are few scholars who have studied the two versions from the perspective of Eco-Translatology.Thus this research attempts to study the characteristics,gains and losses of Fu’s and Li’s versions according to the translation evaluation criteria of Eco-Translatology.By comparatively analyzing the specific translation examples of the two Chinese versions,this study observes that in terms of linguistic dimension,Fu’s version is good at proceeding from the context or the whole text of the original novel to better grasp the characters’ personality traits and their emotional status in the specific scenes so as to accurately deliver the tone of the source text.However,there are some outdated words in it,causing the readers’ confusions.In contrast,Li tends to use the wordings that cater to the expression habits of modern Chinese people,but his version cannot transfer the meaning of the original text well.In the cultural dimension,Fu’s version attaches greater importance to the cultural differences between English and Chinese.Fu tends to change the object of the metaphor in the source text and adopts the diction that is highly consistent with the Chinese culture or its historical allusions.In this way,Fu makes his version achieve a higher degree of adaptation to the ecology of the target language,which is easier for Chinese readers’ understanding.Regarding the degree of transformation in this dimension,Li’s version is lower than Fu’s.As to the communicative dimension,Fu’s version can accurately deliver the source text’s communicative intentions,but occasionally it is not easy to be understood by readers.Thouh Li’s version is easier for readers to understand,it sometimes fails to deliver the source text’s communicative intentions.In the stylistic dimension,Li’s version can better represent the sentence pattern of the source text.To achieve the equivalence between the form of the target text and that of the source,Li’s version sacrifices part of the source text’s contents sometimes.Fu’s version gets rid of the limits of the source text’s form to some extent,which nevertheless fails to well represent the characteristics of the source text.In terms of wording,Li’s version prefers to use the Chinese four-character idioms,which easily fails to accurately deliver the meaning of the source text.And sometimes it combines writings in classical Chinese with Mandarin Chinese,which damages the style of the source text.Comparatively,Fu’s version consciously restricts itself in dictions so as to represent the wording style of the source text.And a comparative analysis on Fu’s and Li’s quality shows that both of them are excellent translators.Besides,by comparing the update speed of the two versions’ editions,each of their total number of commentators on douban.com,and each of their weighted mean of scores on douban.com,this study finds that the edition of Fu’s version is updated more frequently than Li’s,and the weighted mean of Fu’s version on douban.com is higher than that of Li,so it is with the total number of commentators.Therfore,one can say that Fu’s version is more popular than that of Li.To sum up,according to the translation evaluation criteria of Eco-Translatology,Fu’s version holds the higher degree of holistic adaptation and selection compared with Li’s.It is hoped that these findings could provide some references for Chinese readers to select a version of The Moon and Sixpence.The study also notices that due to its early publication,some outdated expressions appear in Fu’s version.Nevertheless,Eco-Translatology believes that every translated text has its life,and the ultimate goal of a translated text is to be everlasting.As the species in ecology can evolve to adapt to a new environment,this research puts forward that a translated text with life can also change itself with the changes of the translational eco-environment in order to keep an everlasting status for itself.This study would call the phenomenon “evolution of the translated text”.The definition of “evolution of the translated text” means that the translator authorizes his translated work to a specific individual or an institution,and the latter will invite the translator himself or other translators to make adjustments to the former version according to the changes of the translational ecology.In this sense,the translated work that has evolved can gain an increasing number of readers,which will prompt translators to improve the quality of their translated works so as to reduce the unnecessary retranslated versions,avoiding the waste of resources.