An Eco-translatological Study On The English Translation Of Characters’ Appellation In Xi You Ji

“Eco-translatology”, put forward by domestic scholar Hu Gengshen at the beginning of this century, isan interdisciplinary translation theory. This theory, taking Darwin’s “adaptation and selection” theory,explains the translation activity by drawing an analogy between “translation” and “biology”,“Eco-environment” and “natural environment” to point out a translator’s dominant status in the process oftranslation. But such dominance is not arbitrary and is restricted by “Eco-environment”, namely, atranslator must take “three dimensions” into account in the process of translation to condense the highestintegration of rendering.Xi You Ji, one of Chinese classical masterpieces, contains profound Chinese traditional culture andunique artistic enchantment in literature. It has been translated into different languages, among which thenumber of English versions are especially plentiful. But there are only two unabridged English versions,one is translated by British scholar Jenner, the other belongs to Chinese American Anthony C. Yu, whosetranslation is widely considered as the most faithful to the original work and has high academic value.Character is the soul of a literary work, the appellations of character in a literary work is also of greatimportance. One of the distinct features of Xi You Ji lies in the great variety of characters in the novel.There are not only ordinary people, but also immortals, demons and ghosts in this novel, thus theappellation of the characters in this novel are very complex and the translation of them is a rather complextopic worthy of academic research.This thesis analyses the process that Anthony C. Yu converted these perplexing appellations intoEnglish from macro and micro aspects of the Eco-translatology. Firstly, on the macro level, the thesisexplores the active dominant process of the translator’s undertaking translation, his choice of the originalwork and decision of translation strategy by examining the translator’s life, experience as well as hisideology. Then, this thesis examines how does the translator adapt and select in the Eco-environment toobtain the highest integration of rendering from the restrained factors of “three-dimensions”, namelylanguage, culture and communication. At last the thesis draws the conclusion that several kinds oftranslation methods are flexibly used in Anthony C. Yu’s translation according to different features of theappellations. Although Anthony C. Yu pursues the foreignization as his translation strategy, thedomestication is infiltrated in the translation practice.This thesis consists of six chapters. The first one mainly states research background, the significance and structure of the thesis. In the second chapter, the author advances the necessity of this study based onthe reviews of previous studies related to this study. The third chapter focuses on theoretical foundationemployed in this study, containing Hu Gengshen’s Eco-translatology and its translator centeredness whichemphasize on translators’ initiative in the process of translation, and “three dimensions” which influencetranslators on their choice of strategies and translation methods. Chapter Four gives a succinct presentationof research design, which is made up of research questions, research object, research methods, datacollection and analysis. Chapter Five, based on the analysis of the data, tries to exam the factors thatfacilitate the translators’ translation strategy and explore the translator’s activity in translation practice fromlinguistic, cultural and communicative level. The last chapter summarizes the conclusions and presents thelimitations of the study.