On Non-literary Translation From The Perspective Of Eco-translatology

The book Earth Calling: A Climate Change Handbook for the 21 st Century introduces such environment crises our human beings are facing as global warming, climate change, dwindling water resources, hurricanes and so on, which indicate that our human being have lost the scared connection with the earth. The aim of this book is to wake up human beings to take actions to protect our common homeland—the earth and reestablish our connections with the earth.Eco-translatology is an ecological approach to translation study. It brings the Darwinian principle of the natural selection and “survival of the fittest” in translation studies. According to eco-translatology, translation is “a selection activity of the translator’s adaptation to fit the translational eco-environment”(Hu Gengshen 2004:39). There are two sections in doing translation: the first is the translator’s adaptation to the translational eco-environment; the second is the translator’s adaptive selection based on the adaptation. Under the guidance of the theory of Translation as Adaptation and Selection, the translator of Earth Calling: A Climate Change Handbook for the 21 st Century analyzes her adaptation and selection in this translation practice. The translator makes adaptations to both the external translational eco-environment such as the social background, the source text, the target readers, and the internal translational eco-environment including the translator’s competence and needs. After that the translator uses specific translation skills such as literal translation, free translation, transliteration to resolve problems encountered in the translation process and then makes decisions to select the target text from linguistic, cultural and communicative dimensions.Through this translation practice, the translator finds that the multi-dimensional adaptation and adaptive selection that the eco-translatology stresses make the translator bear the target readers in mind all the time, which increases the acceptability of the target text naturally. At the same time the translator hopes other fellows can have a good understanding of eco-translatology through this translation report.