A Contrastive Study Of The Two English Versions Of Li Qingzhao’s Ci-poetry-From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

It was in 1999 that Jef Verschueren, a famous Belgian linguist, brought up the theory of adaptation in his book Understanding Pragmatics. Verschueren views pragmatics as a functional perspective. Since then, the theory has attracted much attention in the linguistics circle because it offers people a new perspective to illustrate pragmatics. Its core content is Adaptation Theory which regards language use as a continuous making of inter-lingual and extra-lingual choices. The process of adaptation will occur in every aspect of language. Verschueren stresses that the studies of language adaptation should be conducted from four aspects:contextual adaptation, structural adaptation, dynamic adaptation and salient degrees of adaptation.Li Qingzhao was one of the most distinguished poets of the Song Dynasty. Her poetry has been attracting great attention from translators at home and abroad. Her works was well known for the melancholy, loneliness, lovesickness and patriotic feeling etc. She was good at simple, straight forward style of writing. The language of her poetry is elegant, pure, vivid and lively. This makes her works create her unique YiAnti.This thesis studies two English versions of Li Qingzhao’s poetry from the perspective of adaptation theory, which are Xu Yuanzhong’s 300 Song Lyrics and Kenneth Rexroth & Chung Ling’s Li Qingzhao:Complete Poems respectively. The application of adaptation theory provides us with a new investigative perspective and it is also beneficial to enrich the translation study of Li Qingzhao’s poetry.A contrastive study is conducted in the main part of the thesis to make a research on Xu Yuanzhong’s rhymed translation and Kenneth Rexroth& Chung Ling’s interpretative translation from four aspects of adaptation:context, structure, dynamics and salience.The results of the study are as follows:Mr. Xu Yuanzhong attaches too much importance to the principle that the poem translated must be always in agreement with beauty in both sound and form. Unfortunately, the rhymed translation does injure either the vigor of the language or the literariness of the original version. On the contrary, Kenneth Rexroth & Chung Ling’s interpretative translation adapts better to the translation aims and is easier to be accepted by English readers.