The Adaptation Features and Text Reconstruction in Translating Grand Canal Poems into English

Abstract

The English and Chinese versions of the Grand Canal poems have different adaptation features, which have an influence on the text reconstruction of the English versions of the Grand Canal poems. This study analyzes the pragmatic adaptation features of the English versions of the Grand Canal poems in terms linguistic choices and non-linguistic choices with the representative works of the English and Chinese versions of the Grand Canal poems as the corpus. The study finds that at the level of linguistic choices, the English versions of the Grand Canal poems is, to a large extent, adaptive to the current communicative purpose of the Grand Canal culture expressed in the original Chinese versions, but at the level of non-linguistic choices, it is, to a little extent, adaptive to the above communicative purpose. Therefore, the practice of translating Grand Canal poems into English needs to be improved in terms of linguistic choices at the level of vocabulary, syntax and rhetoric, as well as non-linguistic choices at the level of state of mind, moods and cultural image, so as to reconstruct English versions of Grand Canal poems that are adaptive adequately and fully to the pragmatic features of poems expressed in the Chinese versions and the needs of target readers of English versions.