A Study On The English Translation Of Bronze And Sunflower From The Perspective Of Eco-Translatology

Since the implementation of the “go global” strategy of Chinese culture,many efforts have been made in the overseas dissemination of Chinese literature,which has aroused widespread interest.Bronze and Sunflower,one of Cao Wenxuan’s representative works,is one of the most prestigious works of Chinese children’s literature,and its English translation is a successful example of “going global” of Chinese children’s literature.Ecotranslatology,initiated by Chinese Professor Hu Gengshen,is an ecological approach to translation research,which enriches the perspective of translation studies.According to Eco-translatology,translation is a process of adaptation and selection by the translator,and the translation method is a “three-dimensional” transformation,that is,the translator concentrates on the adaptive transformation of the linguistic,cultural and communicative dimensions.Theories such as Reception Aesthetic,Functional Equivalence Theory and Skopos Theory are mainly adopted in previous studies on children’s literature translation,while few studies have been conducted from the perspective of Eco-translatology.This thesis,therefore,attempts to conduct a study on Bronze and Sunflower and its English translation under the theoretical framework of Eco-translatology,aiming to provide constructive suggestions for the translation of children’s literature.This thesis first summarizes and sorts out the literature on Eco-translatology,the translation of children’s literature and the English translation of Bronze and Sunflower,and generalizes the previous research results.And then,the main concepts of Eco-translatology are introduced in detail.Finally,the translator’s transformation in the three dimensions of Eco-translatology is analyzed.The linguistic dimension focuses on the lexical level and syntactic level;the cultural dimension analyzes the culture-loaded words in this work;and the communicative dimension analyzes the tone of the speaker and taboos in the novel.It has been found out that in the linguistic dimension,firstly,at the lexical level,literal translation,creative translation or similar semantic expressions are adopted to translate onomatopoeic words and reduplicated words in the original,and English rhymes are consciously added in the translation,thus reproducing the phonetic beauty of the original text.At the syntactic level,the translator cuts out repetitive information in the original sentences,renders short Chinese sentences into long English sentences,and rearranges the sentence order.In the cultural dimension,the translator combines both “domestication” and“foreignization” translation strategies to realize the adaptive selection and transformation of the cultural connotation of the culture-loaded words.In the communicative dimension,appropriate translation strategies were adopted by the translator to convey the emotions embodied in the tone of the dialogue to the target readers.Also,there are controversial or sensitive elements in the original text that may be offensive to young western readers and thus affect their reading experience.In this regard,the translator chose to delete or rewrite them so as to obscure the scene described in the original work and convey the communicative intention.Based on Eco-translatology,this thesis analyzes the English translation of Bronze and Sunflower by Helen Wang from the linguistic,cultural and communicative dimensions,which confirms the feasibility of this theory in guiding the translation of children’s literature and provides a new research perspective for the study of children’s literature translation.