On The Translator’s Subjectivity As Exemplified In Goldblatt’s Translation Of Shengsi Pilao

Mo Yan’s works find their roots in the Chinese ancient civilization. With rich imagination and unique writing styles, they depict what has happened in China’s rural and urban areas. Because of the artistic features in his works, Mo Yan was the first writer with Chinese nationality to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in2012. That he became the Nobel Prize winner has largely depended on the English translations of his works by Howard Goldblatt, an American translator. Mr. Goldblatt has always been regarded as one of the most influential translators of Chinese modern and contemporary literature in English-speaking countries. Since1980s, he has rendered the works of more than20Chinese writers such as Su Tong, Mo Yan, Jia Pingwa, Bai Xianyong, Wang Shuo and Xiao Hong.Many traditional translation theories hold that the translator always plays a less important role than the author. However, since "the cultural turn" of translation studies in1990s, more and more scholars and researchers have begun to focus on the influences exerted by the translator’s cultural identity and subjectivity. Thus the position of the translator has been gradually promoted. As a matter of fact, the translator’s subjectivity permeates through the whole process of translation. All the factors such as the translator’s interests, aesthetic standards, translation purposes and ideology affect his/her selection of the source text (ST) and translation, strategy. This will encourage the translator to rewrite or manipulate the ST by choosing a proper translation strategy in the process of translation.This paper tends to explore and analyze Howard Goldblatt’s subjectivity in his translated work Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and suggests that there are two forms of subjectivity:one is manifestation of subjectivity; the other is suppression of subjectivity. On the one hand, Goldblatt has to take the target reader’s reception of his translation into consideration; meanwhile, he has been deeply affected by his own ideology and poetics. Therefore, based on the western culture, he has employed domestication as a main translation strategy and used other translation skills such as deletion, addition, adaptation and annotation. This has completely revealed his subjectivity. On the other hand, Goldblatt has to be subject to English editors, American publishers and critics as well. These patrons, to a certain extent, restrict his manifestation of subjectivity and make him consider some other extra-text factors such as aesthetic orientation of English readers, economic benefits etc.hi the previous studies, scholars and researchers used to emphasize the manifestation of translator’s subjectivity and neglect its suppression. This paper, therefore, can be seen as a breakthrough because it studies the two sides of translator’s subjectivity.