Transplanting And Rewritins:on Howard Goldblatt’s Translation Art

Since the1980s, Howard Goldblatt has translated more than fifty novels of over thirty Chinese writers, of which the most representative versions are from Mo Yan’s seven novels. He is the only translator of Mo Yan’s novels. His contribution to Chinese modern and contemporary literature translation is outstanding. However, studies on his translation in either China or overseas are far from enough. The author of this dissertation attempts to make a tentative study on Goldblatt’s translation of Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death, and tries to explore Goldblatt’s translation strategies and his translation style.This dissertation will be divided into three chapters to study Goldblatt’s transplanting and rewriting art. Chapter One will focus on Goldblatt’s translation strategies of transplanting and rewriting from the perspective of language. Goldblatt usually employs transplanting skills while dealing with distinctive expressions and rhetoric. He modifies these illogical expressions and replaces expressions which can be found in English. His integration of transplanting and rewriting is used to reproduce the original flavor as well as to innovate and improve the original work. Chapter Two will discuss Goldblatt’s transplanting and rewriting strategies from the perspective of culture. Goldblatt tends to transplant the words or phrases with unique features, exotic flavor and rich culture background without affecting reader’s comprehension. For the obscure words and phrases without special features, he tries to avoid misunderstanding by rewriting them. If the words or phrases are obscure yet without any special features, he will integrate both rewriting and transplanting strategies. Chapter Three is concerned with Goldblatt’s transplanting and rewriting skills from the perspective of stylistic features. Goldblatt endeavors to reproduce Sandalwood Death’s uniqueness in dialect, sentence structure and rhyme with transplanting skills. When transplanting skills can’t help him reproduce the unique stylistic features, then he will use rewriting skills. In order to keep the original flavor of the text, he will integrate both the skills of transplanting and rewriting which certainly he is very good at.With discourse analysis of the version, the author of the dissertation finds Goldblatt’s translation strategies are various. He adopts different translation strategies according to different features in language, culture and article style. Based on the principle, he uses different translation strategies such as increasing, deleting, and transferring. Goldblatt’s creative translation not only reproduces but also enriches the expression of original text.