Study On Verbal Irony Translation In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Verbal irony as a common rhetoric device can enrich language expressions,highlight character personalities, deepen the theme and therefore has long been thefocus of attention for researchers who have achieved different findings from variouslinguistic disciplines such as semantics, psycholinguistics and traditional pragmatics.Compared with extensive studies on verbal irony, however, few authoritative theoriesare found to guide its translation in that among the existing theories, few can meet therequirements of verbal irony translation on both micro-linguistic and macro-culturallevels at the same time.Fortress Besieged is a literary treasure full of wonderful ironies. The authorCh’ien Chung-shu has made full use of verbal irony to expose the old society’s faultsand people’s flaws. It does not lack researchers ever since its publication, however,few of them have done research in the study of verbal irony translation. Thisinadequacy has urged the author to make an attempt to explore verbal ironytranslation in Fortress Besieged under the guidance ofAdaptation Theory.Adaptation Theory, put forward by Verschueren who succeeds in integratingcognitive, social and cultural elements into the study of pragmatics, is considered as apragmatic theory having a strong explanatory power and good application value. Itmeets the requirements of verbal irony translation in Fortress Besieged on bothmicro-linguistic and macro-cultural levels. According to the theory, language use is acontinuous making of linguistic choices for the purpose of successful communicationdue to three intrinsic properties of language, that is, variability, negotiability andadaptability. What’s more, the four angles of investigation of Adaptation Theory,namely contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability,dynamics of adaptability and salience of adaptation process, are in line with thelinguistic, social, cultural and cognitive elements pertaining to the dynamic process oflanguage use, and thus it plays a role in guiding the study of verbal irony translation. The current thesis employs Adaptation Theory to study how the co-translators ofFortress Besieged make dynamic adaptations to micro-linguistic and macro-culturalfactors before making the ultimate choices in the whole process of verbal ironytranslation so as to give a systematic description of the process and effect of verbalirony translation in Fortress Besieged. It finally reaches three conclusions:1)Adaptation Theory can provide certain theoretical guidance for verbal ironytranslation on account that choice making is a leading thread throughout the entireprocess of verbal irony translation;2) the co-translators have made adaptation tofactors of linguistic context including target language structures and structuringprinciples, and factors of communicative context ranging from physical world, mentalworld to social world during the course of verbal irony translation in FortressBesieged for the sake of the reproduction of ironic style;3) applying AdaptationTheory into the research on verbal irony translation not only widens the applicationscope of Adaptation Theory, but also offers a new perspective of studying verbalirony translation.