On The English Translation Of Baptism (Xizao)from The Perspective Of The Contextual Adaptation

Translation as an important and common language activity plays an indispensible role in the cultural communication between different languages, so it is necessary to make some efforts to develop and perfect the approaches to conducting translation studies, which has both the theoretical and practical significance. With the rapid development of contemporary linguistics, a lot of scholars begin to use the achievement of linguistics to probe into the translation process. Adaptation theory proposed by Verschueren provides a powerful and comprehensive perspective for translation studies. According to adaptation theory, translation can be regarded as a process of making choices continuously with the strong consciousness.The novel Baptism (Xizao) is a masterpiece with great popularity among the readers and it also has the far-reaching influence on literature field. Baptism contains many typical factors and features of Chinese and its translated version is well accepted by scholars. Therefore, Baptism (Xizao) as an excellent Chinese novel, both the original novel and its English translation provide rich and excellent exemplary language materials for translation studies.This thesis conducts the study from the perspective of the contextual adaptation, analyzing the research materials abstracted from the novel Baptism by discussing their adaptation to linguistic context and communicative context. Context plays an indispensible role in the translation of literary work and its importance in translation can not be ignored. The thorough and accurate adaptation to context can help to produce high quality translated version. The thesis aims to research its translated version and provides some instructive references for the literary translation studies by analyzing the English version of representative Chinese works. The main purpose of literary translation is to successfully transfer the meanings and connotations of the source text into the target text. Adapting to context is the precondition for this kind of transference. In addition, the thesis also discusses the main translation methods and strategies adopted into the process of the contextual adaptation to translation. The translation methods and strategies should be used flexibly on the basis of the contextual adaptation, instead of following some rigid rules.Adaptation theory maintains the usage of language is a process of making choices continuously, so does translation. The contextual adaptation inspires scholars a new perspective for translation studies, which no longer studies the translation activity unilaterally, and it maintains that the study of translation should be an interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional study.