A Study On The Omission In The Translation Of Honggaoliang Jiazu From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

As Mo Yan’ first novel in1980s, Honggaoliang Jiazu is regarded as the mostrepresentative one in his works. Since its publication, it has been spoken highly of andmeanwhile scholars home and abroad have conducted extensive researches on it. Translatedby Howard Goldblatt, the English version of Red Sorghum, however, is rarely studied. Byemploying different theories, some of the previous studies discussed certain translationphenomena such as cultural misreading and stylistic reproduction etc., and taking the wholetext as the study subject, others explored the translation process and its acceptability in targetlanguage. Besides, as traditional translation theories abide by faithfulness, people have longmistaken omission for mistranslations of translators and professional translators, however,still adopt omission strategy in specific translation process. Therefore, the present thesisattempts to analyze the omission in the translation of Honggaoliang Jiazu from a relativelyintegrated perspective of adaptation theory.Verschueren’s adaptation theory suggests that out of internal and external reasons,language use is a continuous process of choice making to adapt to the communicative needs.As an inter-cultural communicative activity, translation can be interpreted as a special form oflanguage use. Thus, the adaptation theory can be applied to translation study, with omissionno exception.The thesis is a descriptive study. By analyzing the specific examples, the thesis tries tostudy how the translator achieves the adaptation at the level of culture, society and cognitionthrough omission. The adaptation in omission is investigated from the following four aspects:adaptation to contextual correlates, adaptation to structural objects, dynamic adaptation, andsalience adaptation.By analysis, the following results have been obtained. Firstly, as the target reader is thepriority, omissions made by the translator mainly aim to adapt to the communicative world,especially the social world and the mental world. Secondly, comparatively speaking,structural objects are rarely adapted to by omission. Thirdly, the selection of omission is adynamic process involved high degree of salience. The thesis provides omission study with anew perspective and deepens our understanding about omission. Finally, adaptation theory isenlightening to translation study in theory and practice.