A Perspective Of Adaptation Theory Of Children's Literature Translation

In the study of literature translation, children's literature translation has been ignored for its peripheral position in translation system both at home and abroad. But it should catch our attention because the translation of children's literature is as difficult as, or even more difficult than, that of adults'. Most target readers of children's literature are children who are different from adults because of their particular age, reading ability and reception ability. Moreover, children's literature owes unique characteristics that are different from adults'in many aspects, such as theme, structure of the story and the language style, etc. When translating children's literature, the translators must keep in mind that there are lots of factors influencing their translation. Specifically speaking, translators should give special attention to linguistic features of children's literature, context and temporal factors in the process of translation.So far very few studies have been done on children's literature translation comprehensively and systematically in China. The adaptation theory was put forward in the book Understanding Pragmatics by Jef. Verschueren in 1999. It is considered as "a pragmatic theory which has strong explanatory power and good application value and it is bound to have a good prospective because it comprehends and interprets pragmatics from a new perspective. (He Ziran, Yu Guodong,1999:428-435) According to Verschueren (2000:55-56), using language must consist of "the continuous making of linguistic choices, consciously or unconsciously, for language-internal and/or language-external reasons." Its four angles of investigations are contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability and salience of adaptation process, which are in perfect agreement with the linguistic, social, cultural and cognitive elements involved in the dynamic process of language use. Therefore, the adaptation theory is applied to study translation, as it is a complicated process of language use. With the guidance of the adaptation theory, this thesis studies selections and adaptations in children's literature translation through the analysis of two Chinese versions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. We draw the conclusion:Firstly, translators need to make selections and adaptations to adapt the linguistic features (phonetic level, lexical level, sentential level and discourse level), context (linguistic context and social context) and temporal dimension (different adaptations according to different times) in translating children's literature. Secondly, children readers are one of the decisive factors that influence translators' selections and adaptations during translating because of their specific characteristics as we have mentioned. Therefore, it is a significant task for translators of children's literature to make the translation readable to children readers. Thirdly, in light of the adaptation theory, translators make selections and adaptations according to different temporal dimension, which manifests the value of different translated versions of the same literature work that solves the argument on which translation strategy should employ. In addition, translators of children's literature should not only have a good knowledge of linguistic features and the cultural knowledge of the original and the target, but should also have a childlike heart.