A Contrastive Study Of Dialogue Translation In Two Chinese Versions Of The Return Of The Native From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

The Return of the Native is written by Thomas Hardy, the most outstanding local novelist in the Victorian Age in England. It has ever become one of the most famous novels of Hardy in twentieth century since its publication in1878. Besides, it’s also considered as one of the representatives among Hardy’s "character and environment" novels for its distinctive description of heath scenery and delicate language style of characters. Therefore, many scholars at home and abroad have done a lot of studies on the beauty of its heath scenery and the precise and vivid literary language. However, there are also abundant lively and vivid colloquial folk dialogues penetrating the whole novel. They are often an efficient and effective device in shaping its characters’images and highlight characters’personalities. On the other hand, they’re also of vital significance to develop plot, intrigue readers and create aesthetics and so on. What’s more, few scholars have put their focus on it. Thus, for the translation research on The Return of the Native, a comprehensive study of its dialogue translation cannot be ignored.This thesis tries to make a contrastive study of dialogue translation in Zhang Guruo’s and Sun Yu’s Chinese versions from the perspective of adaptation theory by Jef Verschuren. Verschuren’s adaptation theory emphasizes that language use is a continuous process of making choices to meet the demand of communication consciously or unconsciously. Dynamic adaptation is the key of the theory. Whereas translation is also a process of making choices since it’s a communicative activity beyond time, place and nation, penetrating all the linguistic, social and cultural elements. This thesis chooses dialogues in The Return of the Native by Hardy and the two Chinese versions by Zhang Guruo(1958) and Sun Yu(2006) as its research data, and then comprehensively makes a contrastive analysis of the differences in the two Chinese versions from the following three aspects:time, communicative context and linguistic structure with a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methodology. Through this the thesis finds out that in general both Zhang Guruo’s and Sun Yu’s versions keep faithful to the source text with various translation strategies. The differences lies in Zhang Guruo’s version, characterized by using decent target text to translate decent source text, mainly adopts domestication as its general translation strategy, especially with the use of free translation, footnote, replacement, transliteration, conversion, division and inversion, while Sun Yu’s version, which aims to pursue the complete transmission of English culture, is prone to use foreignization as its general translation strategy, especially the dominant use of literal translation, which takes over half of the total. Moreover, according to the contrastive analysis of the two Chinese versions from adaptation theory, their dialogue adaptation can be reflected in the aspects of time, communicative context and linguistic structure. The difference lies in that both Zhang’s and Sun’s dialogue translation have a good adaptation to their time, but comparatively speaking, in the communicative context, Sun preserves the original culture better. As for linguistic structure, Zhang has more adaptation to the language feature of Chinese.The whole thesis consists of six chapters:Chapter One serves as an introductory part. It presents the rational and significance, research questions and the outline of this thesis.Chapter Two is the literature review. It’s divided into three parts:the first part is the review of adaptation theory; the second part is the review of novel dialogue; the third part is the review of The Return of the Native.Chapter Three is the introduction of research data and methodology as well as the characteristics and functions of dialogue in the source text.Chapter Four is the main body of this thesis which consists of three parts. It mainly does a contrastive study on the differences of dialogue translation in the two Chinese versions in adapting to time, communicative context and linguistic structure. The first part is the contrastive analysis of dialogues reflected in the producing time of the source text The Return of the Native and its two Chinese versions. The second part is the contrastive analysis of different dialogue translations in communicative context from three aspects:physical world, social world and mental world.In the physical world, it involves event time and place in dialogues; in the social world, it focuses on the culture, including customs, religion, idioms and their cultural context, and social setting or institutions; In the mental world, it pays attention to attitude, personality and mood of characters; The third part is the contrastive analysis of different dialogue translations in linguistic structure from phonological level, lexical level and syntactic level. In phonological level, rhythm and onomatopoeia are covered; In lexical level, it stresses four-character phrases and reduplicated words; In the lexical level, it handles the translation of long sentences, sentence order and parallelism.Chapter Five summarizes the translation strategies through analyzing the respective translation methods employed by the two translators when dealing with dialogues, and elaborates the similarities and differences of the translation methods used in two Chinese versions.Chapter Six is the conclusion which states the major findings and the significance and limitations of this study.To sum up, the thesis discusses that how to analyze and translate the dialogues in the English local novel The Return of the native from the perspective of adaptation theory, so to provide some research methods for the novel dialogue translation in the future.