An Eco-translatological Study Of Yan Fu’s Tian Yanlun

Yan Fu’s Tian Yanlun has been accepted by researchers with its elegantwriting . In his prefaces and commentaries, he afforded us his translationtechniques, in which he explained how to achieve an ideal translation :faithfulness to the original text ( xin信）；expressiveness of the ideas (da达）and literary elegance (ya雅）. Yet his translations, especially his early ones,have been accused of being unfaithful, because of his abridgements, changesand strong personal intrusion as indicted by comments and elaboration mixedwith translation, then as a result of sacrificing accuracy to elegance indicted byhis use of the classical Chinese language and classical Chinese syntax. All thesefeatures can be found in his most classic work Tian Yanlun, so that some criticsalways think these three translation criterions proposed by Yan Fu is notbelievable. They took such a strategy to attack Yan Fu’s translation thoughtmaking him embarrassed . Therefore, for almost one hundred year, researcherswere keeping the same interest in Yan Fu’s translation standards, strategies, thatis, his“faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance”. However, those researchesare not scientific because of ignoring some factors, such as time,environment,society and ideology and so on, which is not fair to Yan Fuaccording to Wang Hongzhi (Wang Hongzhi, 1999: 105).According to Hu Gengshen’s Eco-translatology, those critics completelyignored Yan Fu’s translational eco-environment, and their researches were onlyfocused on translation skills and techniques. They never considered the deep factors. Therefore, those research achievements could be summarized asresearcher’s attitudes on“faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance”; and somevalue judgment to translation works based on just technical levels, that is, tojudge a translation work just from translation skills or strategies. So readerscould just learn nothing except some good translation skills from theseresearches. So it is necessary to study Fan Fu’s Tian Yanlun from acomprehensive viewpoint.Hu Gengshen published his monograph An Approach to Translation asAdaptation and Selection in 2004 and developed it into Eco-translatology in2008. In 2010, Hu made a systematic statement on the First InternationalSymposium on Eco-translatology held in Macao Polytechnic Institute. CayDollerup from University of Copenhangen acclaimed that " Eco-translatology isthe first theory to be truly ’original’ in that it is conceived and has grownoutside that European context" (2010). His Eco-translatology has an eye on theintegrity of translational ecosystem. It is from the eco-translatological angle anduses eco-translatological narrative way to describe and explain translationalessence, produce, standard, principle, and method and translation phenomenonand so on. In this thesis, the author will discuss Yan Fu’s Tian Yanlun from thisnew perspective.This thesis consists of four chapters except introduction and conclusion.Chapter one is the historical review of the theoretical development of theEco-translatology in China and the related research situation about ecology and translation in western countries.Chapter two is the introduction of Yan Fu’s translation practice and ideas.Then it introduces Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and Otheressays and a comparative study of the two versions briefly.Chapter three is introduction of the theoretical framework of the paper. Itincludes the feasibility analysis of Eco-translatology and the research thought ofecology, the relationship between ecology and translation .And the key conceptsof Eco-translatology.Chapter four is the key part of this thesis. It studies Yan Fu’s translationTian Yanlun from the Eco-translatology perspective, and discuss his translationalprocess including pre-translating, during translating and post translating. In thispart, the author focuses on the translator’s adaption and selection in the language,culture and communication dimensions in Yan Fu’s translational process. Thetranslator perfectly adopts the translational Eco-environment, so his translationis a successful one and it fits the top translational standard, which alsosuccessfully plays the role to enlighten the intelligence of the people.Conclusion points out that as the above discussed, the translator’stranslational behavior is the classic eco-behavior. The success of Tian Yanlunbenefit from Yan Fu’s good adaptation and selection in the translationaleco-environment.And Eco-translatology can be used to explain the translationpractices on the basis of their relevance and similarity. With the development oftranslation interdisciplinary, Eco-translatology will offer a new perspective to translation studies in the future.