Influence Of Translational Eco-environments On Literary Translation

Eco-translatology is a new theory to interpret translation process from the perspective of ecology. Thus it studies translation under a big ecological background. Of many theoretical ideas in eco-translatology, adaptation and selection occupy the central position. This theory is proposed under a profound time background and social ideology. Both foreign and domestic scholars have made theoretical and practical studies on this theory. Hu Gengshen and other scholars in China have made researches on eco-translatology by interpreting and exemplifying in details the interpretive function of eco-translatology. With the systematic proposal of a series of terms and concepts, the basic theoretical study of eco-translatology has been becoming mature gradually. Up until now, it has been applied in such areas as literary translation, business translation and interpretation. This dissertation serves as an attempt to apply eco-translatology to explaining literature translation of The Catcher in the Rye.Through comparison and analyses of the two Chinese versions of The Catcher in the Rye, this dissertation tries to explain how the differences arise from the perspective of eco-translatology. Firstly, it recommends Hu Gengshen’s theory of eco-translatology; then, it introduces current foreign and domestic researches on eco-translatology and the translation of The Catcher in the Rye; next, it gives an introduction to the original text and its two Chinese versions respectively; lastly, it compares the eco-environments when Shi Xianrong and Sun Zhongxu translated the text and analyzes the influence of these differences on the two translators during the process of translation.At the end of this study, the writer of this thesis finds that eco-environments of the two translators’time were so distinct from each other that they have influenced the translators greatly during the process of their translation. Political environment played a dominant role when Shi Xianrong translated the text, thus political motivation was Shi Xianrong’s major concern, while when Sun Zhongxu translated the text, people were more tolerant both politically and ideologically, so culture and readership concern was Sun Zhongxu’s translation motivation. Generally speaking, both of the two versions are combined results of their own adaptation and selection made in certain translational eco-environments.