A Study Of Shapiro's Tracks In The Snowy Forest From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

The thesis studies Sidney Shapiro's Tracks in the Snowy Forest from the perspective of Verschueren's adaptation theory.Basically,the theory covers four aspects:"contextual correlates of adaptability","structural objects of adaptability","dynamics of adaptability",and "salience of the adaptation processes".It is to discuss how the translator adapts to the original text and the target readers' reading habits to disseminate Chinese literature and realize the target readers' reading expectation.Adaptation theory stresses that using language must consist of the continuous making of linguistic choices,consciously or unconsciously.Language enables the users to make choices flexibly,so as to meet the needs of communication.Adaptation theory provides a new perspective for translation study:as all the communication activities,translation is also a process of making choices continuously.In other words,from the choice of original text to the use of words in target language,each stage in the process of translation involves choice and adaptation.The original text Lin Hai Xue Yuan(its first version in 1957)by Qu Bo,is a novel,telling a story about the fighters of the Northeast Democratic Allied Army who carried out their mission of suppressing bandits.After five years,its English version Tracks in the Snowy Forest came to the world.It was translated by Sidney Shapiro,who has dual cultural identities and knows well about Chinese and western cultures.Not only does his Tracks in the Snowy Forest adapt to the content of the original text,but it also takes the target readers' feeling into consideration.Shapiro made a decisive contribution to the spreading of Lin Hai Xue Yuan to the western world.The thesis involves six chapters.It begins with a brief introduction to the research background,the research significance,the research questions and the layout of the thesis.In chapter two,it gives a general review of the previous studies of adaptation theory,Tracks in the Snowy Forest,Sidney Shapiro and his other relevant translations.In chapter three,it introduces the theoretical framework adaptation theory and the key notions.In chapter four,the original text Lin Hai Xue Yuan and its English version Tracks in the Snowy Forest are presented.In chapter five,based on the theoretical framework,the thesis makes a detailed analysis of Tracks in the Snowy Forest in four aspects:"contextual correlates of adaptability","structural objects of adaptability","dynamics of adaptability" and "salience of the adaptation processes".The last chapter gives the major findings,original ideas,limitations and suggestions of the research.With qualitative approach,the thesis draws two conclusions finally.First,in the process of translating Tracks in the Snowy Forest,Shapiro applies various translation strategies to adapt to the original text and his target readers'reading habits in different aspects to achieve his purposes of disseminating Chinese culture and realizing the target readers' reading expectation.Second,the thesis provides original significance,for it is the first time to study Tracks in the Snowy Forest from the perspective of adaptation theory.In addition,the author of the thesis indicates that studies of the novel with statistics are expected to be conducted in the future,and it will make the research more persuasive.