On Novel Translation From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Shengsi Pilao is a fine novel composed in2006by Mo Yan, a famous Chinese contemporary avant-garde writer. During the80s of the last century, Yan has risen by a series of literature works with local color which were filled with complex emotions including nostalgia for township as well as resentment against it. And he has been known as the "Root-seeking Literature" writer ever since then. The2012Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to him "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary". Born in Gaomi County Shandong Province and deeply influenced by hallucinatory realism, most of his works are "legends" centered around Northeast Township in Gaomi, Shandong. As one of his masterpieces, Shengsi Pilao is no exception. Returning to the folk culture in artistic creation, through adopting serial novel——the traditional Chinese classical novel, with "lively writing style","full and delightful passion","a powerful and unconstrained style of imagination" and absurd unique narrative style, the novel revolves around the six reincarnations of a murdered landlord named Ximen Nao. Meanwhile, it is through his experiences, the novel tells the story of the changes in rural areas for nearly half a century since the founding of new China. The novel was completed in one go and makes smooth reading. Although it was composed in only43days, the author has conceived it for more than10years. In2008, the novel won the first prize of the second session of "Dream of the Red Chamber Award: World Chinese Novel Award" in Hong Kong.On the one hand, Yan was honored The Nobel Prize for the reason of his stylish writing strength; on the other hand, the successful translation plays a fairly important role if Chinese literature intends to cut a striking figure and take its place in the world. So far, the foreign language versions of Shengsi Pilao include English, Swedish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, etc. The English version was translated in2008by the renowned American Sinologist and translator, Professor Howard Goldblatt. And in the same year it was published by Arcade Publishing, an independent trade publishing company in the USA. Howard Goldblatt is known as "the midwife of contemporary Chinese literature in the English-speaking countries". As an English translator who was in enthusiasm for Chinese literature, his translation works were admired by the Western presses and also favored by many Western readers, which makes him a wide range of influence.In this paper, the author takes Adaptation Theory, which was proposed in1999by Jef. Verschueren, the Secretariat of the International Pragmatics Association and Belgium scholar, as the theoretical basis. The theory is regarded as "a pragmatic theory which has strong explanatory power and good application value"(He Ziran, Yu Guodong,1999:428-435). It has strong explanatory power for literary translation as well------Literature translation is the interlingual communication between two different languages which involves collisions between two cultures. The process of translation is in fact the communication between the translator and the readers as well as the exchange between two different cultures. It is a process of conscious adaptations and continuous choice-makings. From the perspective of Adaptation Theory and under the guidance of translation purpose as well as cultural translation, this paper is intended to give a thorough analysis of the English version Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out of Professor Howard Goldblatt. It focuses on the study of the translation process from the aspects of the literary style and the distinctive narrative perspective of the source text, the readers’aesthetic expectation and their acceptance levels as well as cultural transmission. And it aims to analyze the translation phenomena and the ways the translator uses to adapt to the source text, to the target text readers, culture transmission and other aspects in order to achieve the desired effect under translation purpose.