A Study On Translation Compensation In Big Breasts&Wide Hips From The Perspective Of Eco-Translatology

As the first Chinese writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mo Yan has attracted continuous and enormous attention from scholars across the world. Researches and studies on his novels have been on a steady rise since 2012. Being the sole and widely-acknowledged English translator of Mo Yan’s novels, Professor Howard Goldblatt had undoubtedly become the focus of attention in that his successful translation greatly enlarged Mo Yan’s influence among the English speakers. The English translation of Big Breasts&Wide Hips by Howard Goldblatt in 2004 aroused great enthusiasm among translation scholars who devoted to the analysis of this work under such theoretical guidance as "Functional Equivalence", "Skopos theory" and "Foreignization VS Domestication" etc. This paper set sight on conducting a research on how Howard Goldblatt dealt with the fundamental issue of translation compensation resulted from the inevitable untranslatability. Despite the fact that translation studies have embraced its booming development since 20th century, the knowledge of translation compensation has relatively lagged behind in both theories and practice. As a result, the author of this paper is determined to make a comparative study of the compensation made by Howard Goldblatt from the perspective of Eco-translatology proposed by Professor Hu Gengshen. In this thesis, the Eco-translatology was applied to analyze the translator’s behavior of compensation for the first time because translation can be regarded as a process of selective adaptation and adaptive selection. The combination of these two theories could better enhance the flexibility of the translator, which would hopefully improve the understanding of translation compensation.To clearly illustrate how Howard Goldblatt adapted to the translational environment and selected appropriate methods to make compensatory efforts in translating Big Breasts & Wide Hips, the author compared the source text and the target text carefully and also referred to the previous studies on Howard Goldblatt and his translation beliefs. To exemplify the principles and process of how Howard Goldblatt adapted and selected, this paper cited cases from different angles for the four major methods-amplification, generalization, paraphrase and imitation so as to cover more possible situations. On the basis of quantitative and qualitative analyses, the author of this paper sticks to the principle of combining theory with practice by comparing the source text and target text sentence by sentence, trying to find evidence for the compensation implemented by the translator. To build a solid theoretical foundation, the author not only referred to nearly all the relevant information about Eco-translatology and translation compensation but also consulted the previous studies on the translation of Big Breasts & Wide Hips so as to present more thorough and accurate analyses to the compensatory methods adopted by Howard Goldblatt during the process of adapting and selecting.Considering the characteristics of literary translation, the author mainly devoted to analyzing how Howard Goldblatt compensated for the losses at semantic and aesthetic levels. It is concluded that the combination of Eco-translatology and translation compensation is a good way to analyze Howard Goldblatt’s translation beliefs and skills in translating Big Breasts & Wide Hips because Eco-translatology is workable in discussing why and how Howard Goldblatt conducted the compensation after a series of adaptation and selection in the translational environment. After clarifying the cause-and-result logic, the analyses to Big Breasts& Wide Hips could serve as a better example of literary translation, enriching both the theories and practice in the field of translation studies.