A Cultural Investigation Of The Translated Folklores In Hsiao Hung’s Novels

With the continuous development of translation studies and the upsurge of thecultural school, people begin to realize the importance of translation problemsinvolving social culture and cultural context, therefore, the “cultural value” hasgradually become one of the main tasks of translation studies. Susan Bassnett, one ofthe most important translation theorists in the translation theory circle throughout theworld, is the first one to put forward translation studies should take the “cultural turn”.In her book Translation, History and Culture, she introduced the main content ofcultural translation theory. Howard Goldblatt fully reflected and applied SusanBassnett’s cultural translation theory to his translated versions by adopting all kinds oftranslation strategies. Howard Goldblatt (1939-), the world-renown translator, is thebest one among the English translators of Chinese literature at present. He is veryfamiliar with Chinese literature, so Tales of Hulan River witten by Hsiao Hungbecame the first Chinese novel translated by Howard Goldblatt. Tales of Hulan Riverfocused on Hsiao Hung’s hometown in Hulan and depicted its people still sufferingfrom their feudal heritage in simple yet poetic language. The novel evokes domesticimages and observes village stage performances, exorcist rites and festivals, but alsoreveals the barbarous side of life with an account of a ritual killing of a child-bride byher in-laws. Howard Goldblatt properly dealt with folklore translation in thetranslation of Tales of Hulan River and gave western readers a very vivid picture ofChinese Northeastern folklore. Chinese culture, especially folklore culture, known across the world for itsuniqueness and colorfulness, has reflected itself in every aspect of the Chinese dailylife, for example, clothing, food, housing etc. Chinese multinational and rootedfolklore culture is a kind of special and precious cultural resources. Folklore isdifferent from each other because of their respective languages and culturalbackgrounds, therefore, folklore translation should be studied in the framework ofcultural translation theory. From the perspective of Susan Bassnett’s CulturalTranslation Theory, this paper, which combined with the knowledge of culturaltranslation theory and took folklore translation as an example, aims at discussing howto export Chinese culture in translating Chinese folklore into English, illustrating thepractical value of cultural translation theory and its guiding significance on dealingwith cultural vacancy in the translation process, and understanding the advantages ofcultural translation strategy, in order to promote the development of culturaltransmission and cross-cultural communication much better by the research andanalysis of folklore translation.