An Eco-translatological Approach To Xu Yuanchong's Translation Of Song Of A Pipa Player

The dawn of the 21 st century has witnessed a rapid development of eco-translatology,which,as a result of interdisciplinary research involving both ecology and translatology,was first proposed by Chinese scholar Hu Gengshen in 2001.Based on the views of eco-holism in occidental philosophy and eco-wisdom in oriental philosophy,eco-translatology regards translation as an integrated and harmonious ecosystem in which the translator,source text/language and target text/language interact with and exert influence on each other.Eco-translatology,with “translator-centeredness” as its core concept,treats translation as a process of “natural selection” and “translator's selection”,which respectively refer to the translator's being singled out by(or his necessary adaptation to)the translational eco-environment and the translator's active selection of translation methods to meet such a requirement of adaptation.Bai Juyi,as a prestigious realistic poet of the Tang Dynasty,has exerted a far-reaching influence on Chinese and even world literature.One of his representative poems,Song of a Pipa Player,is regarded as the quintessence of classical Chinese literature.Xu Yuanchong's English version of such a poem adequately maintains the artistic beauty and ideological essence of the source text,which is worth being explored penetratingly.By vividly describing the pipa player's superb skills and miserable life,the Song of a Pipa Player is intended to disclose the darkness of feudal society and express deep concern and sympathy for the lower-class people.Although some of the previous researches have been done on the English version of the Song of a Pipa Player respectively from the aesthetic,functionalist,cognitive and narratological perspectives,few of them have been done from the perspective of eco-translatology so far.Therefore,in the present research,Xu Yuanchong's translation version of Song of a Pipa Player is studied from the eco-translatological perspective,aiming at the exploration of the following two major questions:(1)How is the “natural selection” manifested in Xu's translation of Song of a Pipa Player?(2)How is the “translator's selection” demonstrated in such a translation version?After a qualitative analysis of Xu's translation,the present research has arrived at the following findings:First,in Xu's translation of Song of a Pipa Player,“natural selection” is concretely embodied in his necessary adaptations to the translational eco-environment,including his internal adaptations to own theoretical views and practical experience of classical Chinese poetic translation and external adaptations to the eco-environment constituted by Bai Juyi's source text(i.e.its poetic style,artistic conceptions,psychological-emotional status and social-cultural connotations)and the target text(i.e.foreign readers,social ideology,cultural vacancies and English poetic style).Xu's extraordinary adaptability to the internal and external translational eco-environments qualifies himself as the optimal translator of the Song of a Pipa Player.Second,in Xu's translation of Song of a Pipa Player,“translator's selection” is concretely embodied in his active choice of the translation methods of three-dimensional transformations,say,transformations at the linguistic,cultural and communicative dimensions.The transformation at linguistic dimension involves the prosodic transformation,syntactic transformation and textual transformation;the transformation at cultural dimension involves the translation of cultural images,culture-loaded terms,cultural allusions,cultural customs and the like;the transformation at communicative dimension involves the reconstruction of artistic conceptions of the source text and transmission of values and concepts of the poet.The thesis is concluded by pointing out that the theory of eco-translatology provides a brand new perspective for translation studies,which can be well applied to the analysis of the classical Chinese poetic translation like Xu Yuanchong's translation version of the Song of a Pipa Player.