A Study Of Zhu Qingying's Translation Of Jane Eyre From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Jane Eyre is Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece, which plays an important part in the history of English literature, is also a well-known novel all over the world. It successfully portrays the image of a female who is brave to revolt, and pursues the freedom and equality. Thackeray commended it as "a great genius's masterpiece". George Eliot was deeply intoxicated with it. It has been deeply welcomed by Chinese readers since it was translated into Chinese in 1930's. Its translated versions has reached over twenty, among which Li Jiye, Zhu Qingying, Wu Junxie and Huang Yuanshen's versions are relatively excellent. Meanwhile, these translated versions arouse the interest of many scholars and experts in the field of translation. They have researched them from different angles. However, these researches mostly remain in the micro level, mainly explored the translated versions'language, style, culture and so on. For instance, in the communicative rhetoric, fictional dialogue and so on. There have not been systematic and overall researches for the translation of Jane Eyre since now. Therefore, the author explores the translation of Jane Eyre from a relatively overall perspective with the help of Adaptation Theory.Adaptation Theory was put forward by Jef. Verschueren in 1999, and 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). The core of this theory is that language use is a process of making dynamic adaptations. Its four angles of investigation are:contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability and salience of adaptation processes. These four angles are in perfect agreement with the linguistic, social, cultural and cognitive elements involved in the dynamic process of language use. Therefore the theory is employed to study translation as it is a complicated process of language use. The author analyzes Zhu Qingying's version of Jane Eyre with a view to approach the nature of translation and testify the explanatory power of Adaptation Theory for translation. This thesis is made up of an introduction, three chapters and a conclusion. The introduction explains the research background, objective, method, questions and significance. Chapter One is literature review, which includes some previous related studies. Chapter Two is theoretical framework, firstly gives a brief introduction of Adaptation Theory, and then introduces some ideas of translation based on Adaptation and points out that the process of translation is actually a process of making choices and adaptations either consciously or unconsciously. Chapter Three firstly introduces Jane Eyre, its author, its translator Zhu Qingying and her translated version, and then makes an analysis of Zhu Qingying's Jane Eyre from the perspective of Adaptation Theory to indicate the explanatory power of this theory. The conclusion sums up the whole of this thesis.Basing on the study of Zhu Qingying's translation of Jane Eyre from the perspective of Adaptation Theory, the author points out that translation is a process of language transference and cultural transmission in which the translator continuously makes dynamic adaptations to contextual correlates and structural objects with different degrees of salience under the guidance of translation purpose. In the translating process, the translator continuously makes choices to attain the translation purpose. Therefore, the translator should make clear his or her translation purpose before translation, and take all kinds of factors ranging from contextual correlates to structural objects into consideration in the process of translation, and finally make the best choices. Within the framework of Adaptation Theory, a lot of translation problems can get rather satisfactory explanations and therefore this theory has strong explanatory power for translation.