On Howard Goldblatt’s Translation Of The Republic Of Wine From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

The Republic of Wine is a satirical novel written by Mo Yan, which was finishedin1990s. Different from Mo Yan’s other works, this novel, which reveals thecorrupted officialdom and attacks the drawbacks in political system, has not attractedmuch attention for a long time after its publication, for it is called “a novel unable tomake comments”. However, Mo Yan regards this novel as “the most perfect novel tillnow”, and calls it his “beautiful and unruly lover”. This novel has peculiar writingtechniques, in which the plots are weird and tortuous, contents are complicated andvarious, which has few similar works at home. There are huge amount of descriptionsabout fantastic scenes, dialectal dialogues and Chinese culture-loaded expressions.Therefore, the translation version of this novel is well worth making research.This thesis intends to analyze the English version of The Republic of Wine (2000)translated by Howard Goldblatt, a famous American sinologist.The guiding theory of this thesis is skopos theory. As a core of Germanfunctionalist approaches, skopos theory holds that translators are free to choosewhatever proper translation methods to serve their intended functions. The skoposrule is the prime principle that overall translational action should follow. Thecoherence rule and fidelity rule are subordinate to the skopos rule. Meanwhile,according to the skopos theory, the evaluation standard of translation should bedetermined by whether the translators’ purposes could be achieved adequately.Based on the skopos theory, this thesis makes analysis of the source text throughan enormous number of cases with the application of skopos rule, coherence rule andfidelity rule. This thesis is divided into six parts:The first part is the introduction that presents the research background, researchquestions and research significance.Chapter One is literature review in which preview researches about this novel areintroduced; Howard Goldblatt’s translation and the application of skopos theory in thestudy of literary translation are introduced. It is concluded that not too manyresearches about English version of The Republic of Wine have been made, whichdetermines the significance of this thesis.Chapter Two introduces the theoretical framework of this thesis, in which thehistorical background and development of skopos theory are listed. Then the three rules and relationship between them are introduced. The last part introduces adequacyin translation.Chapter Three is textual analysis. Combined with demands of skopos theory,studies of the English version of this novel are carried out from three perspectives ofskopos theory, skopos rule, coherent rule and fidelity rule.Chapter Four introduces the translation methods adopted by the translator of thisnovel in the translation process, including literal translation, free translation, alteration,addition and deletion. Based on these methods, some examples in the target text arechosen to make detailed analysis.The last part is conclusion in which the main findings of this thesis are summedup. The limitations in this research are pointed out, which are significant to the furtherimprovement.