A Study Of Goldblatt’s Translator Behavior In The Translation Of Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out

Traditionally, translation studies are generally prescriptive by nature, a kind of guideline of pre-translating, whereas descriptive studies are generalization and description of post-translating. A classical example is that a prescriptive evaluator tends to evaluate whether each word is faithful to the original or not, if not, he will offer some suggestions. Instead, a descriptive evaluator tends to describe the translation objectively and probe into the reasons why the translator will translate in that way. Nowadays, descriptive translation study is drawing more and more concern in the academic circle of translation because descriptive evaluators adopt objective approaches to analyze translation while prescriptive evaluators sometimes add their subjective opinions. Also, a study without objective description will lose the significance of conduction.Based on the background of descriptive translation, Professor Zhou Lingshun constructed the "Truth-seeking-Utility-attaining" Continuum Mode of Evaluation Towards Translator Behavior to describe and interpret translator behavior and the socialization of translation. This thesis will employ the mode to explore how Goldblatt attained utility in the translation of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out.This thesis, first of all, presents a picture for the study and provides the brief introduction of Mo Yan and his works Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Later, the profile of Howard Goldblatt is presented and his views of translation are also outlined to the readers. Having focused on the theoretical basis, the "Truth-seeking Utility-attaining" Continuum Mode, the thesis starts to analyze Goldblatt’s translator behavior by putting his translations into the evaluation mode from the perspectives of translation of proverbs, Chinese cultural expressions, deviated collocations and names by classifying them into truth-orientation and utility-orientation. In conclusion, Goldblatt’s views of translation keep in line with the thought of evaluation mode. Besides, most of the time, Goldblatt would like to choose truth-seeking orientation because it has much to do with his views of translation. As to utility-attaining, for the original texts which possess strong Chinese color, he inclined to translate with integration and addition; for those which has little to do with development of story or impedes readers’ comprehension, he would like to choose omission so as to conform to English features. Also, in order to make the translations smooth, he made some alteration from structural and cultural perspectives. If we probe into deep causes, translator, as a body of will, always considers social needs and readers’ acceptability and it is natural for him to exert his volition. However, there really exist some flaws. For the version of over-truth-seeking type, it may be resulted in overestimating the amount of Chinese knowledge which western readers have while the version of under-truth-seeking type owes to translator’s subjective choice or the inadequacy of understanding of the original. However, such behavior is also a manifestation of his utility-attaining and his role ranging from a linguistic being to a social being.