A Study On Wang Fengzhen’s Chinese Translation Of The Good Earth From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

The Good Earth, which was published in1931, is the second novel of Pearl S. Buck, who had grown up in a bilingual and bicultural environment, famous for writing books with Chinese subjects. The novel greatly influenced the American world even the whole western world. It occupied the top of the best-seller list in1931and in1932. In1932, The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize. Then it was turned into a Hollywood movie, causing a sensation. And it contributed to Pearl’s Nobel Prize in Literature in1938. After being published, The Good Earth was rendered into more than one hundred kinds of languages. It serves as a connection of intercultural communication as well as a bridge through which westerners understand China. Soon after being published in USA, The Good Earth was rendered into Chinese with eight Chinese translations in China’s several publishing houses. In the late of20th century, the significance of The Good Earth and Pearl S. Buck was rediscovered, and The Good Earth was retranslated. Since1988, nine Chinese translations have been published in China, among which, six translations are translated by Wang Fengzhen. He is the first and latest translator of The Good Earth after the foundation of People’s Republic of China. The translation, published by People’s Literature Publishing House in2010, is the most popular and the latest one, having the largest number of Chinese readers. Recently, many scholars have studied The Good Earth from the perspectives of feminism, ecologism, post-colonialism, stylistics and so on. There are very few studies on Chinese translations of The Good Earth. This thesis is a new attempt to study Wang Fengzhen’s Chinese translation of The Good Earth from the perspective of pragmatics. It aims to testify the explanatory power and guidance of Adaptation Theory on the translation process.In this thesis, Jef.Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory serves as the theoretical basis to make a detailed analysis on the translation of The Good Earth (Da Di, translated by Wang Fengzhen). This thesis, with specific examples taken from the source text and the target text, makes an in-depth exploration into the translation process. It analyzes what and how appropriate choices are made by the translator in this translation to fulfill communicative purposes. Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory is a general pragmatic perspective to explain language use, taking into account the cognitive, social and cultural elements. The theory argues that language use is a continuous process of making choices under the influence of inter-lingual and extra-lingual properties to realize communicative purposes. Translation is regarded as a process of making linguistic choices in which the translator turns the original text into the target text. It is a special two-way process of language communication and adaptation. From the perspective of Adaptation Theory, translation process includes not only the translator’s interpretation of the author and the original culture, but also the translator’s adaptable production of the target culture. This thesis makes an analysis on Wang Fengzhen’s Chinese translation of The Good Earth from the perspective of Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory:adaptation to linguistic context (cohesion and coherence, sequencing), adaptation to communicative context (physical world, social world and mental world) and adaptation to language structure (utterance-building ingredients and code). To put it specifically, the examples with zero anaphora, deictic words and conjunctions are analyzed to study the coherence in target text. The differences of sentence order in the source text and the target text can be seen as the adaptation to sequencing. The examples with spatial deixis are examined to see the adaptation to physical world. The variants of addressing terms in examples are used to study the dynamic adaptation to social world during the translation process. The examples with cultural images are studied as the proof of adaptation to mental world. In order to study the utterance-building ingredients, Chinese sentences with four-character Chinese structure,"Ba" sentence pattern and subsumption sentence are presented. Some colloquial words and sentences, which are used in North of Anhui, along with vulgar words and refined words, are provided to study the adaptation to language code. Through the detailed analysis, we can see that during the translation process, the translator can make proper choices to adapt to the contexts and language structure under the theoretical framework of Adaptation Theory so as to achieve the transfer of languages and transmission of cultural information. In addition, the thesis makes a detailed analysis about the sentences which are taken from the English text of The Good Earth and Wang Fengzhen’s Chinese translation text. The analysis provides a new way for researchers to study The Good Earth and Pearl S. Buck.The thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter one is the introduction of the whole thesis. Chapter two is the literature review about the studies on Chinese translations of The Good Earth and Adaptation Theory. Chapter three serves as the theoretical framework of Adaptation Theory of the study. Chapter four focuses on a detailed analysis of the source text and the target text of The Good Earth from the perspective of Adaptation Theory. Chapter five is the conclusion of the study in which the author of the thesis points out the findings and limitations of the study, and proposes suggestions for further research.