A Study Of Howard Goldblatt’s Red Sorghum: A Novel Of China From The Perspective Of Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory

Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu is one of the most influential works that Mo Yanpresents to contemporary Chinese literature. Setting the historical background of thisstory in the Anti-Japanese War period, Mo Yan tells a war story from a uniqueperspective and creates a group of red sorghum heroes. These red sorghum heroes areneither perfect people nor the embodiment of justice, which makes them more aliveand closer to reality and humanity. The whole story is filled with Mo Yan’s creativethinking and shows his excellent controlling ability of Chinese. Mo Yan breaks thetraditional time order and logic in the story, delivering a spirit of freedom to readers.Howard Goldblatt, a famous American translator, started his translation ofMo Yan’s works from Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu after reading some parts of the novel.As Mo Yan’s first work that enters the American market, the translated work RedSorghum: A Novel of China has achieved a great success. Red Sorghum: A Novel ofChina has a good reputation in America and is never out of print in the last decade.Its sales volume has reached15,000by now, which is a very good performance in theAmerican market. The achievement of Red Sorghum: A Novel of China in America isnot only an approval of Goldblatt’s translation, but also an approval of the originalwork. This is also the motivation of this thesis.In the exploration of the success that Red Sorghum: A Novel of China achievedin America, the author of this thesis found that the success is closely related to theadaptation made in the translation process by Goldblatt, either consciously orunconsciously. In Howard’s translation, he consciously or unconsciously adapts theoriginal work to relevant linguistic context and communicative context, which isexactly the theme of this thesis.The Adaptation Theory of Jef. Verschueren is adopted in this thesis as thetheoretical framework and develops a systematic study on the translation process ofRed Sorghum: A Novel of China. Jef. Verschueren is a Belgian pragmatist, holding the post of the general secretary of international pragmatics association in Belgium.The Adaptation Theory explains the use of language from an integrated perspectiveof cognition, sociality, and culture. According to the Adaptation Theory, the use oflanguage is a choice-making process made by both parties of the communicationunder different degree of consciousness in order to adapt to the communicative needs.From the perspective of the Adaptation Theory, the translation activity is also a formof language communication activities. Considering each factor that influences thecommunication, a translator has to make choices so that to adapt a translated text to aspecific context.This thesis discusses how a translator adapts a translated text to a specificpragmatic context, so as to achieve the expected translation effect, starting from theanalysis of non-textual factors, such as the selection of the literary work, the socialidentity of the translator and publishing house, the “material” conditions of thetranslated work. Case studies on Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu and the translated versionare given to explain how translators adapt to the linguistic context andcommunicative context in literary translations. A reasonable conclusion is drawn inthe final part of this thesis. Adaptation Theory provides a relatively beneficialmethod to study the reaction between the literary translation and its related context.There is indeed a positive correlation existing between a successful translation andits context adaptability.