A Study Of Howard Goldblatt’s Translation Of Red Sorghum From The Perspective Of Rewriting Theory

Mo Yan became the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in2012, which makes Chinese literature popular in the world market and the translation of Chinese literature become the focus of the translation studies. As one of Mo Yan’s representative works, Hong gao liangjia zu was translated by American Sinologist Howard Goldblatt. It was published in the American market in1993and achieved a great success. It is of significance for the going out of Chinese contemporary literature to analyze the reasons for popularity of Howard Goldblatt’s translations in the world market and to summarize Goldblatt’s translation techniques and strategies adopted in his translating process.According to Andre Lefevere, translation is not only to deal with transformation in the linguistic level, but also deal with rewriting in the cultural level. Translators translate words, ideology, poetics as well as cultural images. Translation is a rewriting process of the original texts under the manipulation and influence of ideology, poetics and patronage in the target culture. By means of rewriting, translators make the translated works conform to ideology, poetics in the target culture and easily accepted among target readers (Sun,2010:4).This thesis is based on Andre Lefevere’s Rewriting Theory. By comparing Howard Goldblatt’s English version of Red Sorghum with Mo Yan’s original work:Hong gao liangjia zu, the author finds that the translated version is not completely faithful to the original work, which contains lots of rewriting phenomena. By studying the manipulation and influence of ideology, poetics and patronage in the American culture on Howard Goldblatt’s selection of original texts and translation strategies, this thesis attempts to analyze Goldblatt’s rewriting phenomena in the translation of Red Sorghum and the reasons for popularity of Goldblatt’s translations in the western world, to summarize Goldblatt’s adoption of translation techniques and strategies, and to explore the applicability of Rewriting Theory to the translation of Chinese contemporary literature. Based on the analysis of Howard Goldblatt’s whole translation process of Red Sorghumfrom the perspective of Rewriting Theory, the author finds that target language readers’acceptance of the translated works is Howard Goldblatt’s first consideration. He flexiblyadopted domestication as the main strategy and foreignization as a complementary strategy inthe process of translating Red Sorghum. The author also attempts to put forward somesuggestions for the translation of Chinese literary works.