A Study On The Translation Of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

The famous American writer Mark Twain?s classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?hereinafter abbreviated as Huck?was regarded as the origin of American literature in the 19^th century.Furthermore,some experts and scholars in both foreign literary and translation field pay lots of attention to this novel.So far,there have been more than 120retranslated versions of the novel in the country.Although the predecessors have conducted a lot of translation studies on Huck,according to the information retrieved by the author from CNKI,the predecessors mainly studied the translation from the perspective of literary stylistics,relevance theory,system function and functional translation theory.Therefore,this thesis intends to study the translation from the perspective of adaptation theory in order to make the research more systematic and comprehensive.This thesis chooses the Huck translated by Zhang Yousong as the research subject based on Verschueren?s linguistic adaptation theory.This thesis aims to answer two questions,one is in what aspects does the Chinese version adapt to the source text,and the other one is what translation strategies are employed in this Chinese version to achieve adaptation.This thesis mainly analyzes and evaluates the Chinese version from communicative context adaptation?physical world,mental world and social world?,linguistic context adaptation?cohesion,intertextuality and sequencing?,structural objects of adaptability?sound,word and sentence?and dynamics of adaptability and so on,in order to prove that Zhang Yousong?s translation of Huck is a process of language adaptation.This thesis analyzes the Chinese translation of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by adopting descriptive research method from the perspective of adaptation theory.In addition,through the analysis of the Chinese translation of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,this thesis mainly draws the following conclusions:First,Zhang Yousong?s translation adapts to contextual correlates of adaptability,structural objects of adaptability,and dynamics of adaptability.secondly,through analyzing the selected examples,it can be found that Zhang Yousong mainly adopts a domestication translation strategy so that the target reader can have better understanding of the original text.Specifically,there are some translation methods,such as literal translation,free translation,the combination of literal translation and free translation,omission,annotation,and transliteration and so on.The study has the following implications:First,the analysis and discussion of specific examples of the Chinese version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will not only help target readers have comprehensive and profound understanding of this novel,but also allow target readers to have good command of the source text and source culture.Secondly,through the analysis of the Chinese translation,it is hoped that it will provide some suggestions for the translation of other literary works.