2. Literature Review

2.1 An overview on Eco-translatology

The theory of eco-translatology was firstly proposed by our Chinese scholar, Professor Hu Gengshen on the basis of his book “Translation as Adaptation and Selection” which was written in 2008. In fact, eco-translatology first appeared more than a decade ago, and has been gaining extensive attention in the academic field of translation studies and experiencing rapid development. Its research consists of two classes: theory and application in China. Eco-translatology was first put forward in China, and it draws a lot of attention from all across the world. A lot of foreign scholars began to pay their attention on the eco-translatology. For some examples, Michael Cronin, in his work Translation and Globalization, first came up with the notion of “translation ecology”. What’s more, Daniel Gile, a French well-read man, discussed the ways to adapt to the translational eco-environment when he translated his paper On Adaptation to the Translating Environment in Research on Translation.文献综述

So far, a number of papers on eco-translatology have come out and applied researches on eco-translatology in various fields are increasing year by year. The nuclear conception of eco-translatology is to establish “translation theory of adaptive selection of preliminary conception”, cited from Darwin’s principle of “natural selection, survival of the fittest” to explore the philosophical theories and the feasibility of translation activities. Translation is a result of “natural selection” and an activity adapted and selected by the translator in his “translational environment” (Hu Gengshen, 2004:97). Such a translational eco-environment is made up of three systems, respectively, the source system, the original text system, and the target language system, which is both the collection of the factors that restrict the translators’ optimal adaptation and the premise of the translators’ multi-dimensional adaptation and adaptive selection (Hu Gengshen, 2003:288). Until now, many scholars in translation field have made a lot of work and study on the effects that eco-translatology has on the translation of ancient books, advertising language, film title and subtitle translation. However, the applied studies of ecological translation in Chinese prose are quite rare, so this paper attempts to explain the prose translation on the basis of eco-translatology. Based on the studies discussed above, this thesis, taking two English versions of Zhu Ziqing’s He Tang Yue Se as the study subject, tries to explore the two English versions from the perspective of eco-translatology.