A Study Of The English Translation On Mo Yan’s Shifu, You’ll Do Anything For A Laugh From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

As a very famous writer in China, Mo Yan, who won the Nobel Prize on Oct.11 st 2012, became the first Chinese writer who got the prize. The reason that Mo Yan’s works can succeed and win the wide acceptance at abroad, is closely related to Goldblatt’s translation. Scholars at home and abroad mainly conduct research on his long novels from the perspective of literature, and there are few studies having been done on the translation of his novelettes comprehensively and systematically. Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh is one of the typical novelettes of Mo Yan. This thesis tends to study the novelette Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh from the perspective of Adaptation Theory and to prove the theory has great explanatory power on translation.Adaptation Theory was put forward by the Belgian scholar Jef. Verschueren in his book Understanding Pragmatics, and it was regarded as a pragmatic theory that owned great explanatory power and application value. This theory provides a brand new view for pragmatic research. The core of Adaptation Theory is that language use is a process of dynamic adaptation, and people will constantly make dynamic choices in the process. Translation is a process of making dynamic choices. A good translation work must effectively adapt to linguistic, cultural and social information. This thesis mainly conducts research from the perspective of contextual adaptation. The context consists of linguistic context and communicative context. The former includes cohesion, contextuality and sequencing; the latter consists of mental, social and physical world. This paper aims to study the translation methods that the translator uses to adapt to the communicative context and how he translates the words embodying Chinese culture to express shifu’s humor.Through analyzing the examples selected from the original and target text by the qualitative method, there are following findings: the translator mainly adopts literal translation and literal translation plus explanation method to adapt to the idiom translation in the social world. In order to adapt to the mental world, physical world and the translation of culture-loaded words in the social world, the translator mainly employs free translation, omission and substitution methods, which can effectively deal with the cultural differences between English and Chinese, successfully convey the communicative information, adapt to the communicative context and make it easier to accept by target readers. In the aspect of adapting to the linguistic context, the translator adopts transliteration, literal translation plus explanation and amplification to faithfully reproduce and convey the information of the source text. This way of translation well preserves the style of the source text and vividly expresses the hero’s humor. In order to realize the dynamic adaptation and good translation results, the translator has to take various factors of linguistic and communicative context into consideration.The research on the translation of Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh proves that Adaptation Theory has great explanatory power on translation. And the translation research makes readers know the characteristics of Chinese culture in the specific period, which is good for the transmission of Chinese culture.