Strategies For Translating Chinese Cultural Elements Into English From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

With the frequent cultural exchanges between China and other countries, Chinese cultural elements translation has attracted attention from translators. As the bridge between two different cultures, translators confront the challenge that they must cope with the Chinese traditional culture elements in the Chinese-English translation. Jef Verschueren puts forward Adaptation Theory as a new perspective to instruct the use of language. He believes that language can be treated as a continuous process of making choices. Translators also need to conform to language and cultural mechanism, because translation is an activity of trans-lingual cultural exchange. According to the Adaptation Theory, in the process of using language linguistic choice-making depends on contextual factors which require making adaptation to all levels of structure. Context and structure mutually comply with each other in the process to dynamically generate meaning. The basic process can be understood as follows:using language, choosing language and making adaptation involve some cognitive elements. Hence, he advises to study language use from four perspectives, i.e. contextual adaptability, structural adaptability, the dynamics intention of adaptability and translators’ability. As translation is a special kind of language use, the study of translation should be studied from four angles. In translating some chapters of the thesis of "the Taoist School, Religious Taoism, Philosophical Taoism" from Chinese to English, the author of this paper has applied adaptation theory to address the translation of culture elements and reach the conclusion that the theory is generally applicable in this translation work.