The Analysis Of Xu Yuanchong’s Translation Of Dream In Peony Pavillion From The Perspective Of Contextual Adaptability

With the implementation of the "going out" strategy of Chinese culture,translation which acts as the media and bridge of China’s foreign cultural communication plays a more and more significant role for the strategy.Classical Chinese poetry and prose is considered to be an integral part of traditional Chinese culture,therefore the translation of which is of great importance.Dream in Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu in Ming dynasty is among the four classical dramas in ancient China.It has been hailed as a shining pearl in the history of Chinese drama for its brilliant ideas and excellent artistic charm.So far,there are four complete English versions of the drama,among which Xu Yuanchong’s version published in 2009 is the latest one.The artistic charm and influence of Xu’s version has been fully interpreted and demonstrated by the terrific performance in United States.Therefore,Xu’s version has been chosen as the research object.So far a good number of researches,of which the overwhelming majority are comparative studies about two or three versions,had been done about the other three versions.And fewer researches have bee done on Xu’s version and no scholar has ever had a research on the version from adaptation theory.Adaptation theory proposed by Jef.Verschueren provides a completely new perspective to interpret language use.It is believed that the adaptation of language use can be evaluated from the following four research dimensions:adaptation in contextual correlates,adaptation in structural objects,dynamic adaptation and the salience of adaptation.Due to the fact that Dream in Peony Pavilion is a stage play,therefore oral communication is what reflected the most and also because there are great differences between Chinese and English in oral communication especially in communicative context.Moreover,in recent years it is agreed by scholars in the field of translation that adaptation theory can be used to guide and interpret translation studies.Therefore,the research dimension of contextual adaptability with the framework of adaptation theory is chosen to conduct the research on Xu’s version of Dream in Peony Pavilion.Totally,60 examples are collected from the communicative context and linguistic context from the dimension of contextual adaptability;descriptive method,method of comparative analysis and method of induction are applied in the analysis and discussion of the examples.lt is found that the strategy of domestication is employed in most cases to make the translated text close to the target audience as much as possible,thus making appropriate contextual adaptation,but still foreignization is employed in some cases to keep the original flavor of source language.And for translation methods,addition,omission,substitution,paraphrase and employment of more accurate diction are used to realize adaptation in communicative context;addition,omission,reconstructing sentence structures and rearranging sequencing of words are used to realize adaptation in linguistic context.