Selection And Adaptation In The Translation Of Children's Literature: A Case Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Charlotte's Web

Children's world is a beautiful and fantastic land where a child can set free his imagination to his heart's content.Children's literature,as a subsystem of the literary system,tells lovely stories and conveys emotions to us.In real life,however, children's literature has not received its deserved attention due to inequality in status between children and adults,leading to the fact that studies on children's literature translation have drawn little attention for a long time and the related research results have been ignored.Moreover,no book on children's literature translation is available in China at present.Jef Verschueren,the Secretary General of International Pragmatic Association, put forward the adaptation theory in his book Understanding Pragmatics in 1999,in which he described language use as selection and adaptation.Applying the adaptation theory to the translation of children's literature,this paper studies selections and adaptations involved in it through the analysis of two Chinese versions of Charlotte s Web.We draw the conclusion that there exist multi-level and multi-dimensional selections and adaptations in the translation of children's literature,and that translators of children's literature should actively make selections and adaptations.In the process of translating children's literary works,translators' selections and adaptations are influenced by a series of elements such as children readers' age, language,acceptability,psychological characteristics and aesthetic sentiment.Only when the translator of children's literature adapts to the target context,or specifically speaking,to the target children readers' mental,social as well as physical world and to their language and style,can the translated children's books be understood and accepted in the target culture and its social value realized.To achieve this end,the translator should follow a children-orientated approach and choose good eyeball-catching source works according to children's interest and reproduce childlike expressions adapted to children.An excellent CL translator should try to avoid being "over-adultified" or "over-childish".To adapt to children's characteristics and needs,translators should bear in mind the following principles:1) use domestication as the main translation strategy supplemented with foreignization;2) use colloquial expressions rather than formal and unfamiliar ones;3) make the target text vivid,humorous,rhythmic and musical;4) choose concrete words rather than abstract ones to present a creature's appearance,actions and discourse without adding his emotion or evaluation;and 5) adopt various kinds of rhetoric devices such as onomatopoeia,personification,repetition and the like to appeal to a child.