Initial Analyses Of Applicability In Translation Study From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Adaptation Theory

This paper constructs system on the basis of Adaptation theory.The directional verbs in Hong Lou Meng a monumental work in literature,together with its two translation versions(translated by Yang Xianyi and Hawkes respectively)are used as the research objects.On the one hand,directional verb is a special lexicon in Chinese;on the other hand,although there have been numerous research achievements about Hong Lou Meng few scholars are involved in the translation research of directional verbs because of its complexity and variety.On that account,the article analyzes the directional verb “Xia Lai” with its translations collected from the work(about 700 examples)as representative case study.With the help of parallel corpus of Chinese-English,the author collects all the Chinese texts and English texts of “Xia Lai” from the translation of Hong Lou Meng by Yang Xianyi and Hawkes first,then makes classification and summarization according to its different meaning.It can be seen from the instance analysis that,though translated in varied ways,the translations of Yang Xianyi and Hawks are both an interpretation unit which is a process of translating based on the overall understanding of words,sentences or even paragraphs.The meaning of sense group---The meaning of the syntactic level---is changing with its inner composition,which leads to the dynamic Adaptation of the meaning.Thus,the author holds that directional verbs should be translated in sense groups.Only translated in such way,can the target language and the original language realize the dynamic Adaptation of context,structure and consciousness level.There are four parts in total.The first part is literature review,which describes the current research situation of directional verb and Adaptation theory.Meanwhile,it also introduces both Hong Lou Meng and the versions of Yang and Huo,as well as the innovations of this thesis.The second part is the elaboration of theoretical system.In this part,Adaptation theory,which is clearly illustrated,is combined with translation research.All of these form the theoretical basis of this thesis.The third and fourth part is the core of this thesis.Part three puts more emphasis on example analysis.Besides,it is based on the theories and takes the typical English translations in the corpus as examples.On that basis,part four aims at analyzing the translation of directional verbs in Hong Lou Meng so as to choose the best strategy of Chinese-English translation.