A Study On Chinese Translation Of Chinese-American Poetry From The Perspective Of Translation-as-Adaptive-Variation Theory

In the twentieth century,with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and the Pan-Asian Movement,Chinese-American poetry flourished,giving birth to a number of outstanding and representative Chinese-American poets such as Li-Young Lee,Cathy Song and Marilyn Chin.Chinese-American poetry is an important part of Asian-American literature,reflecting the collision and integration of Chinese and American cultures,and it is an artistic crystallization of intercultural examination of Chinese-American history and social reality,permeated with the unique body temperature and ethnic emotions of Chinese-American poets.The Chinese translation of Chinese-American poetry is different from the general Chinese translation of English poetry that has its unique artistic and application values.However,the proportion of Chinese-American poetry translation studies is extremely small and marginalized that its artistic value and translation strategies are seriously neglected.In order to study the translation strategies and techniques of Chinese-American poetry,this study intends to select fourteen poems written by six poets who are Li-Young Lee,Cathy Song,Marilyn Chin,Mei-mei Berssenbrugge,Wing Tek Lum and Arthur Sze,as the research objects,and explore the translation strategies and methods of Chinese translation of Chinese-American poetry based on the Translation as Adaptive Variation Theory.This thesis builds a connection between the study of Chinese-American poetry and the study of translation adaptation variation theory that opens up a new perspective for the study on Chinese-American poetry in Chinese translation and proposes a new angle for the problem of the small proportion and marginalization of Chinese-American poetry in translation research.The introduction section introduces the background and significance of the study of Chinese and American poetry in Chinese translation,followed by the research objectives and significance of this thesis,and finally introduces the overall thesis structure.The first chapter of the thesis is the literature review.The domestic and foreign research on Chinese-American poetry and the Translation as Adaptive Variation Theory are sorted out,and the problems that arise in the process of translating Chinese-American poetry are presented to provide an opportunity for writing this thesis.Chapter two provides the theoretical framework.The three main principles of the Translation as Adaptive Variation Theory and the three different characteristics to which they belong are introduced separately,also the textual analysis and research are conducted from these three principles in the latter part of the thesis.Chapter three presents a textual analysis of Chinese translations of Chinese-American poetry from the adaptation principle.This chapter starts from the three characteristics of the adaptation principle,including obligatory adaptation,optional adaptation and bidirectional adaptation and conducts a textual analysis of the poems and translations respectively,indicating that translation adaptation is the starting point and motivation of all translation activities in the Chinese translation process of Chinese-American poetry.Chapter four presents a textual analysis of the Chinese translation of Chinese-American poetry from the conditioning principle.This chapter starts from three characteristics of the conditioning principle,which are contextual condition,subjective condition and optional condition and conducts a textual analysis of the poems and translations respectively,indicating that the conditions in translation not only define the limits of translation choices,but also help translators make reasonable translation choices.Chapter five provides a textual analysis of the Chinese translation of Chinese-American poetry from the variational principle.In this chapter,the three characteristics of the variational principle that are linguistic variation,functional variation and associative variation,are used to analyze the poems and translations respectively,indicating that the choice of translation variation strategies in the process of Chinese American poetry translation is a necessary path and inevitable result.The final conclusion part of the thesis points out that in the process of Chinese and Western cultural exchange,the translation of Chinese-American poetry should be carried out with the readers and the source language as the center,with specific analysis of specific problems and good trade-offs between content and form.In this way,Chinese and Western cultures can be widely disseminated and communicated,and the scope of intercultural and cross-linguistic communication can be expanded.