A Study On Goldblatt’s Translation Of Chinese Culture-specific Items In Big Breasts And Wide Hips

With the coming of "cultural turn" in translation studies, the role of the translator as a cultural mediator is more emphasized than ever before. As any one culture is divergent from another, culture-involved translation, especially literary translation, is difficult indeed. And so translating culture-specific items in literary works appears to be all the more challenging. Mo Yan, a representative writer of root-seeking literature, employs lots of culture-specific items which are imbued with national and local color in his fictions. The fact that he has obtained the Nobel Prize in spite of the distinct Chinese characteristics in his works, to some extent, signifies that Chinese literature has finally won some recognition from the world. However, it is widely recognized that the contributions of Howard Goldblatt, his English translator, to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature cannot go unnoticed. Besides, Goldblatt has extraordinarily translated those culture-specific items in Mo’s works. Therefore, this paper, by studying the translation of culture-specific items in Mo Yan’s Feng ru fei tun, is likely to shed some light on two thorny problems:translating culture-specific items and introducing Chinese literature to the West.By collecting the translation of culture-specific items into a corpus and working statistically on the translation methods in the first18chapters of Big Breasts and Wide Hips, the author makes use of both qualitative and quantitative research methods in her study. The author finds that literal translation, neutralization and cultural equivalent are three top-most methods used by Goldlbatt in translating these items. After analyzing typical translation instances from the corpus, the author considers that some factors such as the importance of the item in the SL text and the degree of the item’s impact on the receptors’comprehension influence the translator’s choice of translation methods. On that basis, the author puts forward three translation principles for translating culture-specific items:Firstly, literal translation has priority over other methods when literal renderings do not impair comprehension; secondly, the reproduction of the content has priority over that of the form; thirdly, the connotative meaning of the message needs to be made explicit in translation. Besides, literal translation tops the list of all the three frequently-used methods. As literal translation is a method that preserves much cultural color of the source text, Goldblatt’s translation has been popularly and critically acclaimed. This offers some clue how China should undertake its project of introducing Chinese literature to the West. Goldblatt has trailed a path where cultural elements and specific characteristics in the Chinese literary works can be best conserved in the process of translating them into foreign languages.