Transparent Translation

Huozhe is one of the representative works of Yu Hua,a famous contemporary writer in China.It has been listed as one of the most influential literary works in the past decade.It uses the double narrative structure,folk song narrative,and concise and plain language,which tells the story of Fugui,an old man’s life under the social background from the Civil War to the Cultural Revolution.The story of the novel takes place in the rural areas under the background of a series of social changes in contemporary China,and contains a number of cultural loaded words and sentences with Chinese characteristics.In the novel,folk songs are embedded,metaphors and personification are widely used,and descriptive language is used to show the dialogue and details of characters.The translation and introduction of Chinese contemporary novels is of great significance for shaping a civilized and open image of China and improving the soft power of Chinese culture.In recent decades,more and more overseas sinologists have attached importance to Chinese contemporary literature and had translated it overseas.Meanwhile,Huozhe was translated by Michael Berry,an American Sinologist,and To Live was published in 2003.Once published,To Live has attracted wide attention and has received praise of major media in the United States.Berry said: "As a translator,I hope readers don’t see Michael Berry’s style,I hope I play the role of a transparent person.Through me,the original can speak in English environment to express the spiritual world of the original".This paper summarizes the term "transparent translation" from Michael Berry’s words and uses "transparent translation" to analyze To Live,the only English translation of Huozhe,from three aspects of narrative structure,language characteristics and culture heterogeneity,so as to contribute a little to the study of English translation of To Live.In this paper,qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis are combined,and the corpus retrieval software wordsmith tool 4.0 is used for analysis,so as to achieve the balance between subjective analysis and objective data.It consists of five parts: the first part briefly introduces Michael Berry of the English translator,summarizes the transparent translation from his perspective on translation,and gives the definition and characteristics of the transparent translation;the second part discusses how To Live is faithful to the narrative structure of Huozhe from the double-layer narrative structure,the direct quotes,and embedded folk narrative;the third part discusses how To Live is faithful to the language characteristics of Huozhe based on the statistics of corpusretrieval software wordsmith tool 4.0;the fourth part discusses how To Live is faithful to the cultural heterogeneity of Huozhe from culturally loaded words and Chinese cultural sentences;the fifth part summarizes the result the problem and significance of the thesis.The research shows that To Live is completely faithful to the narrative structure,keeps the content and the cultural heterogeneity as far as possible of Huozhe,which almost achieves the similar aesthetic value with the original text,and reflects transparent translation.Transparent translation requires translators to convey the unique language and cultural heterogeneity of the original text to the target readers,which is helpful to bring Chinese culture to the world.