Translation As Translator's Adaptation And Selection

Translation studies had, for long time, mainly taken a prescriptive model, focusing on nature of translation, criteria for translation and translation techniques, but obscuring translation process and translator, the most dynamic factor involved in the process. It is the "cultural turn" in translation studies in the West after the 1970s that discovers the translator and brings increasing attention to the research on the subjectivity of the translator. But translator's subjectivity hadn't been put to a top priority till a "translator-centered" translation model was put forward by Hu Gengshen. Translation is defined from translator's perspective, as a translator's adaptation and selection in a translational eco-environment, which refers to the worlds of the source text and the source/target languages, comprising the linguistic, communicative, cultural and social aspects of translating, as well as the author, the client, and the readers. All the adaptation and selection in the translating process are due to translator. The translator's adaptation is selective, and at the same time, the selection is also adaptive. Translator's adaptation and selection can be put into three aspects, i.e. adaptation/selection to needs, adaptation/selection to his competence and adaptation/selection to translational eco-environment.The present thesis attempts to make a tentative study of Lin Yutang's translating Fusheng Liuji within Hu's theoretical framework of translation as adaptation and selection. It is to prove that Lin's choice of the source text Fusheng Liuii and translation strategies are due to his own adaptation/selection to the above-mentioned three aspects, in which his subjectivity plays a crucial role.Chapter one is an introductory part with a brief literature review. The theoretical perspective — translation as translator's adaptation/selection and the object of the thesis — Lin Yutang's translating Fusheng Liuii are put forward.Chapter two talks about the translator Lin Yutang's adaptation/selection to external and internal needs. From the beginning of the 20th century to the World War II, most of the Chinese translation practitioners strove to render foreign literatures to China to modernize her language and literature. In contrast, having experienced the World War I, huge industrial expansion and the Great Depression, the Western world turned to theChinese culture to overcome the malady of modernization. However, as a Chinese, Lin paid more attention to Western world's need and translated more from Chinese into English than the way round. To introduce the Chinese culture to the Western world, he chose to translate Fusheng Liuji for the Chinese scholars' temperament, personality and view of life represented in it conformed to his own life philosophy and it could fulfill his strong internal need for self-expression, motivated by his psychological state at that time.The third chapter deals with Lin's adaptation/selection to his competence. According to the translator-centered theory, in order to survive better in the translational eco-environment, the translator improves the version's degree of holistic adaptation and selection by selecting the source texts that correspond to his own competence. The competence covers not only the translator's bilingual and bicultural ability, but also his ability to keep the original literary style of the source text in the target text. So in this chapter, Lin's bilingual and bicultural competence is first talked about. Then the literary correspondence between the source text and Lin Yutang is dealt with. Lin's competence in the familiar style writing and advocating Hsingling literature found the correspondence between the translator and the source text, which shares the characteristics of the familiar style writing and Hsingling literature. This chapter, together with Chapter two, gives the answer to the question why Lin chose to translate the very source text Fusheng Liuji.The fourth chapter is about Lin's adaptation/selection to translational eco-environment. The translational eco-environment covers source text, source-language and target-language systems, each of which can be put in various dimensions, such as linguistic, cultural and communicative dimensions. So in the translation process, the translator adapts to various dimensions and then selects translation methods adaptively. However, it's impossible for the translator to adapt to all the dimensions due to the differences between two languages and cultures. Moreover, due to the different text types and textual functions of the source texts, the dimensions can't be always treated equally. In this chapter, the author chooses linguistic and cultural dimensions to analyze how Lin adapted and selected in the process of translating Fusheng Liuji, which is an expressive text. As to the linguistic dimension, holding the idea that "The beauty of works lies not in its contents, but in its form, which is the kernel of literature", Lin did his best to keep the original form. He directly translated the four chapters of the original into "Wedded Bliss," "The Little Pleasures of Life," "Sorrow," "The Joys of Travel", keeping...