Dynamic Adaptation To Communication Context In Cultranslation

At present, cultranslation is a hot issue attracting the attention of many scholars in the translation circle. There are mainly two approaches to cultural translation, i.e., domestication and foreignization, and for years whether to retain the cultural image or not has been an issue of debate among translators. With the development of pragmatics, more and more works on translation are approaching the issue from a pragmatic perspective.Actually, much translation work and research has been done from the perspective of pragmatics, such as Nida's Dynamic Equivalent Translation and Newmark's Communication Translation, both of which emphasize on the pursuit for "the closest natural equivalent in the target language". In 1980s, Relevance Theory posed by D. Sperber and D. Wilson, which has become the principal guidance in pragmatic translation, considers the appropriate understanding of natural language is to find the optimal relevance and the reasonable deduction. The emergence of the book, The Pragmatics of Translation, edited by Leo Hickey, explores the effect that pragmatic theories have on translation in multi-levels, arguing that Pragmatics may help the pragmatic equivalence between source language versions and target language versions, thus the comprehension and feeling just the same as that of the original readers will be produced to the largest extent. In general, translators lay stress on the effect of actual language use and target language readers' equal response to translated versions; Pragmaticists deem that translation is an activity of information communication, and it pays heed to the applicational effects in linguistic communication, emphasizing the equivalent effects a translator achieves between the source and the target texts. At the mostelementary level, pragmatics can be defined as the study of language use, or, to employ a somewhat more complicated phrasing, the study of linguistic phenomena from the point of view of their usage properties and processes. In pragmatic theories, the theory of adaptation was posed by Jef Verschueren, Secretary-General of International Pragmatics Committee, in 1999. This thesis proposes a translation strategy which aims to retain the source language culture with a prerequisite of dynamic adaptation to the communicative context, and this strategy is supposed to help the realization of the double functions of translation-information communication and cultural propagation.The thesis consists of four chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion.After a brief introduction to the cultranslation from the perspective of pragmatics, the author presents the adaptation theory in some details in the first chapter, including its three characteristics of language, the definition of dynamic adaptation, and the four angles of investigation, etc.Chapter Two starts with different definitions and classifications of context given by scholars in China and the West and its effect on translation. After introducing Verschueren's idea of context and his contextual adaptation theory, the chapter sets out to argue that undoubtedly context plays a key role in translation practice, especially in cultranslation.Chapter Three mainly addresses the long-time debate between domestication and foreignization in cultural translation. The thesis seeks to provoke that domestication and foreignization are two useful approaches under different circumstances, and that translators should make appropriate choice according to different contexts .In other words, a proper translation method can only be taken with a prerequisite dynamic adaptation to communicative contexts.