A Study Of Manipulation In Goldblatt’s English Translation Of Contemporary Chinese Novels

On the basis of Lefevere’s manipulation theory, the thesis makes an in-depth analysis of Howard Goldblatt’s English translations of Red sorghum from the perspective of ideology, poetics and patronage, and explores the applicability of manipulation theory to contemporary Chinese novels translation. The central parts of the thesis focus on the detailed analysis and explorations of Howard Goldblatt’s English translations Red Sorghum. Firstly, under the manipulation of ideology, the translator rewrites some information about politics and cultural element of the novel to cater to the target reader’s reading habits. Secondly, under the manipulation of poetics, the translator makes the English version more compact and continuous in plot development by means of omitting the non-narrating comments and reorganizing the events, which is brought about by the different writing notion of the original author and that of the translator. The thesis also concentrates on the manipulation of patronage on the translator and the publication of Red Sorghum. Howard Goldblatt holds that Chinese literature’s accessibility to the overseas market would be conditioned by manipulation of the source text in accordance with target reader’s reading habits. In the process of translation, Goldblatt adopts addition, omission and alteration techniques to minimize the aesthetic gap between the source text and the target text to maximize the target reader’s expectation, at the same time it also reflects manipulation theory’s influence on Howard Goldblatt.