A Translation Of Mo Yan’s Three Essays About Eating And Its Strategies:the Textual Perspective

The Chinese author Mo Yan has been awarded the2012Nobel Prize for literature, making him the first ever Chinese literature Nobel laureate. The Three Essays about Eating, i.e. Eating Invites Humiliation, Piggish Eating Manners and All about Eating are included in his collection of essays A Wall That Can Sing. In the three essays he incisively and vividly depicts his hideous eating experiences that are somewhat fictitious and exaggerated. The words and sentences he uses in the essays are simple, but readers can easily grasp the implied ridicule and sarcasm.This dissertation, based on my translation of the Three Essays about Eating, analyzes the key points and difficulties I have encountered during my translating process from the textual perspective, from which translation is regarded as a top-down recreation of the text. The theory of textual translation not only deals with language use within the text, but also involves intertextual association, so it can provide an overall guidance in producing a good translation work. The dissertation analyzes my translation strategies from the textual perspective, including how to achieve the equivalence between the target language and the source language in coherence, logic and writing style in the cultural context. Coherence, logic, writing style and cultural context are four mutually complementary elements that all combine to construct a meaningful text.