A Study On An English Translation Of200Yuanqu Poems From The Perspective Of Eco-translatology

The Yuanqu peoms are great treasure of Chinese culture, which are as important as the Tang poetry, the Song lyrics, and the novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties. They form an important landmark in Chinese literary history. Yuanqu poems have been passed down and appreciated by many readers. Many Yuanqu poems have been translated into foreign languages and appreciated by foreign readers and scholars. Among the translated works of Yuanqu poems, Professor Zhou Fangzhu’s An English Translation of200Yuanqu Poems is an outstanding one. However, compared with the study on the translation of the Tang poetry and the Song lyrics, the study of the translation of Yuanqu poems is less. With the development of translation studies and the prosperity of translation theories, more and more scholars begin to study the translation of Yuanqu poems from different angles. This research will study the translation of Yuanqu poems from Eco-translatology.Professor Hu Gengshen put forward the Eco-translatology in2008. He analyzed the translation process from the perspective of ecology, generalizing the selection of translations into the translator’s adaptation to the translational eco-environment, and the translator’s selection under the guidance of the translational eco-environment. Eco-translatology deems that the translation activity, as all the other activities in the natural world, should adapt to the "nature", which refers to every factor influencing the translation and is defined as "translational eco-environment", consisting of the source language, source text, target language, target reader, and the social environment of the translator’s time, etc. This theory also holds that the translator’s selection of the target text is based on his or her multi-dimensional adaptation to the translational eco-environment. If the translator couldn’t well adapt himself to the translational eco-environment, his choice of the target text would be doomed to fail from the very beginning. Eco-translatology forms its own approach to studying translation by researching the translation process from a macroscopic way. It directs researchers to evaluate the quality of the translated versions from their translation processes and holds that the excellent translation results from the translator’s perfect adaptation to the translational eco-environment and adaptive transformation from the three dimensions of language, culture, and communication.This study explores Professor Zhou’s translation process from the perspective of Eco-translatology, aiming to answer the following questions:Firstly, is Professor Zhou’s translation process a process of adaptation and transformation?Secondly, if it is, what does Professor Zhou adapt to in the translational eco-environment of Yuanqu poems?Thirdly, how does Professor Zhou transform from the three dimensions?The research methodology of this study is descriptive and textual analysis. The author goes through Professor Zhou Fangzhu’s An English Translation of200Yuanqu Poems and analyzes the translations in the book one by one from the perspective of Eco-translatology. Based on the analysis, the author finds out that:Firstly, Professor Zhou’s translation process is a process of adaptation and transformation.Secondly, in the process of adaptation, Professor Zhou not only adapts himself to the internal translational eco-environment with the translator as the center, including the translator’s need and competence but also adapts himself to the external translational eco-environment with various elements as centers, including the source text, the target reader and the mainstream ideology of the translator’s time.Thirdly, in the process of transformation, since Professor Zhou has already adapted himself to the translational eco-environment, his adaptive transformation from the three dimensions perfectly meets the requirement of the translational eco-environment. In linguistic dimension, he not only retains the form of the original text but also realizes the beauty of sound; in cultural dimension, he compensates the loss of information by addition and annotation; in communicative dimension, he reduces the degree of difficulty of understanding by translating the denotation of the image and leaves the target reader the room to imagine by reproducing the poetic imagery.This study hopes to provide the translation of Yuanqu poems with plausible translation strategies and methods.