A Study On The Variations In The English Version Of Lang Tu Teng

Lang Tu Teng takes its author Jiang Rong (Lu Jiamin), a publicity-shy first-time author who writes under a pen name, 30 years to complete. Since its publication in 2004, it has attracted considerable interests; however, little attention and study has been given to the English version of Lang Tu Teng, translated by the famous American sinologist Professor Howard Goldblatt after its publication in 2008. Lang Tu Teng is a book that shows great concerns about humanity and people's homeland and echoes people's soul, and it is worthwhile to pay attention to and study both its Chinese version and English version. Based on post-colonial translation theory, along with the reception theory and the western modern cultural translation theory, this thesis takes the English version of Lang Tu Teng as a case to do a tentative study on variations of cultural elements in the translation from Chinese into English.Variation in the thesis refers to the omissions, changes, deviations, cultural filter and cultural misreading. The thesis first discusses the variation of the image of wolf, one of the main images in the source text. Due to different understanding of the image of wolf in the translator's own culture, and affected by the patron which is the publisher in this case and by the potential readers, the translator omitted parts of the original text, thus changing the image of wolf. Meanwhile, this kind of omission also reflects the power differentials in translation as well as the eastern literature's marginalization by the western dominant poetics. Second, variations of words occurring in the process of translation are also brought into discussion in this thesis because words are one of the most important components of a text. Then we find out that because of the difference of languages, thought patterns and cultures, the translator has adopted the strategy of domestication to translate, resulting in the loss and distortion of the original cultural images. Such variations, on one hand, cause the particular culture in the original text to disappear; on the other hand, they can also bring some unexpected advantages, for example, readers of this kind of translated works can find some traces of their own culture in the translated version and they become more familiar with them. To some extent, the translator has created another new version that is different from the original text and more acceptable to foreigner readers. At last, the thesis discusses variations of narrative discourses based on narratology from the variations of modes of speech presentation and rhetorical discourse. Based on the above discussion, the thesis concludes that in the post-colonial context, translation has become a battlefield on which different western and eastern cultures clash, consult and struggle, and it inevitably results in variations in the translation.This thesis aims at making the following contributions: first, we hope to observe the rule of translation activity from another different aspect after the study of variation, and it will be a further discussion of the interrelationship between the original text and the target text on the basis of previous studies on the original text and the target text. Second, we hope that it will be an enrichment of the text-centered research of the literary translation studies. Third, we hope that it will provoke thought on how to spread the Chinese contemporary literature especially literatures of national minorities to the west properly.