A Study Of The Translation Strategies Of Culture-loaded Words In The Chinese Version Of Moment In Peking From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Moment in Peking(2003)is a long novel written in English by Lin Yutang which aims to show Chinese culture to the world.It describes the 40 years’ historical changes in modern China from the Boxer Movement to the Anti-Japanese War and contains a large number of culture-loaded words.The Adaptation Theory,put forward by the famous Belgian linguist Verschueren(1987),breaks through the research framework of traditional pragmatics and expounds on the dynamic process of human language use comprehensively at both macro and micro levels.Therefore,the application of Adaptation Theory to translation can promote the study of language adaptation phenomena arising from the exchange between different cultures.In recent years,the translation academia has done much research on the Chinese translation of Lin Yutang’s Moment in Peking based on a lot of famous theories,such as Cooperation Theory,Relevance Theory,and Memetics.However,among these studies,there are only several research based on the Adaptation Theory currently.Under these circumstances,this thesis intends to analyze the translation strategies of culture-loaded words applied in Zhang Zhenyu’s Chinese version(Zhang’s version)through a self-built corpus from the perspective of Adaptation Theory.Moreover,this study aims to explore and identify the reasons why Zhang Zhenyu chooses certain translation strategies from the perspective of Adaptation Theory.The findings are as follows.Firstly,Zhang Zhenyu’s translation strategies vary according to different categories of culture-loaded words.Among the material and ecological culture-loaded words,foreignization is the main translation strategy.The employment of domestication and foreignization in social culture-loaded words is equally divided.As for the translation of language and religion culture-loaded words,domestication plays a major role.Secondly,based on the perspective of Adaptation Theory,Zhang Zhenyu adopts different translation strategies,which not only in order to convey the meaning of the original text accurately,but also to conform to the background information,cognitive style,and language habits of the target readers.Therefore,Zhang Zhenyu’s effective and efficient application of Adaptation Theory makes the readers understand the original text completely with less reading time and thinking effort.It is hoped that the results of this study can enrich the research on the translation strategies of Chinese translations of culture-loaded words in Moment in Peking from the perspective of Adaptation Theory.In addition,the self-built English-Chinese parallel corpus of culture-loaded words in Moment in Peking during the research process can provide data support for subsequent related research.To some certain extent,this research can also provide ideas and references for the analysis of culture-loaded words in literary works for future research.