A Study On The English Translation Of She Hun Gu From The Perspective Of Jef Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory

With the rapid development of the Internet,suspense novels in contemporary China are more and more popular among the readers.With ingenious ideas,tortuous plots and rigorous reasoning,Zhou Haohui’s suspense novels have attracted the attention of the public.In order to let the world know something more about Li Dingguo,a general at the end of the Ming Dynasty,Zhou Haohui skillfully constructed the suspense novel,She Hun Gu,composing a sad song of belief in the good and evil of human nature.Belgian pragmatist Jef Verschueren believes that the traditional study on pragmatics cannot have a comprehensive understanding of pragmatics,nor can it solve such problems as vague definition and broad scope of pragmatics.Therefore,he came up with studying pragmatics from a new perspective,that is,pragmatic perspective,whose core idea is the adaptation theory.Verschueren holds the view that the use of language is the process of making choices consciously or unconsciously so as to achieve the purpose of communication.With strong inclusiveness and explanatory power,the adaptation theory has been widely applied to the field of translation studies.The process of translation is a kind of language communication activity.In the process of translation,translators need to adopt different translation methods and constantly make choices to adapt to the social-culture of both the source and the target language.Taking the adaptation theory as the theoretical framework,this thesis studies the English translation of She Hun Gu from communicative context adaptation and structural objects adaptation,and analyzes how Bonnie Huie constantly makes choices in the process of translation in order to adapt to the social-culture of both the source and the target language.Communicative context adaptation is presented from three aspects: physical world,social world and mental world,and structural objects adaptation is analyzed from phonetic,lexical and syntactical level.The thesis finds that to adapt to the social-culture of both the source and the target language.,Bonnie Huie adopts different translation methods.In terms of communicative context,the translator adopts such translation methods as literal translation,paraphrase,idiomatic translation,etc.,which adapts to the understanding of the target readers and spread Chinese culture.As for structural objects,according to the differences in grammar and culture between Chinese and English,the translator adopts the translation methods of transliteration plus annotation,one term with different translations,paraphrase,idiomatic translation,etc.to adapt to the language and culture of the source language and the target language.