An Analysis Of Transitivity In The Translation Of Big Breasts And Wide Hips From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Big Breasts and Wide Hips is Mo Yan's most representative and longest novel,which is about how Mother Shangguan Lu brought up her children and grandchildren laboriously during the turbulent years.The sinologist Howard Goldblatt's English version of Big Breasts and Wide Hips enjoys a very high popularity in the overseas market and he has made a great contribution to Mo Yan's wide fame abroad.Many scholars and researchers have conducted studies on this novel from various perspectives such as from the perspective of comparative literary criticism,the narrative strategy,the aesthetic perspective and so on,especially after Mo Yan's winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012.In the framework of Functional Grammar,transitivity refers to a system that construes the experiential world through a manageable set of process types and it is of some assistance to the characterization of figures and theme-revealing.According to Verschueren's Adaptation Theory,language use must consist of the continuous making of linguistic choices.Translation,as a kind of language use,is also a process of making continuous linguistic choices by the translator.The Adaptation Theory has provided a fresh angle for translation studies.The success and acceptability of Goldblatt's English version Big Breasts and Wide Hips has always got scholars' studying enthusiasm.This thesis intends to investigate the selection and translation of the transitivity system in Goldblatt's translation version from the angle of Adaptation Theory with the aim to explore the success of his English translation.After careful transitivity analysis of ten sample texts(selected in the order of plot development)focusing on the description of the protagonist in the novel—Mother Shangguan Lu,the author found that the translator Goldblatt has generally followed Mo Yan's style in selection of the transitivity system in the original text.They both use the material process,the mental process and the relational process as the principal process types to shape a suffering,diligent,kind and selfless mother to the readers.Through specific case studies,the author has found that Goldblatt has fully taken the original novelist and the target readers into consideration and made some contextual and structural adaptations in the process of his dealing with the transitivity system in the original text.The contextual adaptations mainly include three aspects: physicaldimension,mental dimension and social dimension.Those structural adaptations cover the language structure ranging from word,sentence to text.The adaptations have made his translated version more readable and acceptable by western readers and played an important role in his success.This thesis combines the pragmatic theory—Adaptation Theory with the translation study,which can enlarge the research perspective of transitivity and broaden the development of the inter-disciplinary studies.What is more,the adaptation of the transitivity system can be used as a reference point for the judgment of translation work.