2. Literature Review

2.1 An Overview on Eco-translatology

Since the conception of eco-translatology was firstly put forward by Hu Gengshen in 2001, many related topics have become research hotspots in the field of translation. All kinds of academic journals, graduation thesis and conference papers published one after another. After more than ten years’ development, eco-translatology has made remarkable achievements both in theoretical construction and practical application. Eco-translatology has great significance in translation studies and draws much attention from translators both at home and abroad. From 2001 to now, Professor Hu Gengshen has published more than ten articles. The book “Translation as Adaptation and Selection” written by him was published in 2004. Then in 2008, Understanding Eco-translatology was published in Chinese Translators Journal. In this article, the basic connotation, background and research limitations of eco-translatology are discussed in detail. What’s more, Cay Dollerup highlighted the important role of eco-translatology on translation in his work Eco-translatology in Translation Theory Contexts (2010). Daniel Gile, in his article On Adaptation to the Translating Environment in Research on Translation, elaborated some constructive ways to adapt to the translational eco-environment in translation activity. In 2013, Hu Gengshen’s Eco-translatology: Construction and Interpretation is published, which gives a detailed illustration about the new theory. 

At present, we can see the tendency that more and more scholars pay attention to eco-translayogy and it has been gradually used in various fields such as translation on advertising language and film title. With the guidance of Darwin’s principle “natural selection, survival of the fittest”, eco-translatology places the translator into an important position. Eco-translatology is a new model of translation theory, which defines translation as “selection activity of translators’ adaptation to translational eco-environment”(Hu Gengshen, 2003: 284). It provides literary translation with a new perspective. The novel Jane Eyre has always been welcomed by people from all over the world, and it has a lot of Chinese versions. Many scholars have made a comparative study on these versions of Jane Eyre from different perspectives, but few of them have applied the theory of eco-translatology to analyze these different versions. According to eco-translatology, a successful translation is produced by the translator’s adaptive transformation from multiple dimensions (Hu Gengshen, 2011:8). Therefore, this thesis is intended to compare and analyze two versions of Li Jiye and Huang Yuanshen from the perspective of eco-translatology.