On Howard Goldblatt’s Translation Of Red Sorghum From The Approach To Translation As Adaptation And Selection

With the rise of the Descriptive Translation Studies and the prevalence of cultural research orientation, the translator’s subjectivity function in the translation process is becoming gradually prominent. Hu Gengshen borrowed from the basic principle and thought of "adaptation and selection" theory of Darwin’s biological evolutionism, and defined the translation from the perspective of the translator as "the selection activities of the translator to adapt to the translational eco-environment". This theory highlights the translator’s subjectivity and central position, providing a new perspective for translation study.Red Sorghum is one of the representative works of the Nobel Prize in Literature Winner Mo Yan. The novel reveals the magnificent tragicomedy which took place in the vast sorghum land in Northeast Gaomi of Shandong Province during the Anti-Japanese War with the new art technology, hyperspace narration pattern as well as the brand new perspective and situation. The novel was translated into English by the American scholar Howard Goldblatt and published by the Penguin Group in 1993 and increasingly caused the attention of the researchers and appreciations of the readers from English speak countries (especially American readers).This thesis takes the approach to Translation as Adaptation and Selection as the theoretical framework, conducts the research on analyzing the selective adaptation and adaptive selection of Howard Goldblatt in the Red Sorghum translation in order to adapt to the translational eco-environment. The translational eco-environment of Howard Goldblatt in the Red Sorghum translation is first introduced as well as his selective adaptation on needs, ability and environment respectively. Then, with the aid of WordSmith Tools 6.0, Goldblatt’s adaptive selection transformation in linguistic dimension is investigated by searching and analyzing in the self-built bilingual parallel corpus of Red Sorghum. His adaptive selection transformations in cultural and communicative dimension are demonstrated in the case analysis with the help of related tables. This study combines quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, and gives priority to the qualitative analysis.The result shows that in linguistic dimension, Goldblatt realizes the adaptive selection transformation on the dialect, rhetoric and high frequency vocabulary, guaranteeing the linguistic features of the source text as well as the fluency of the target text. In cultural dimension, Goldblatt overcomes the obstacles caused by cultural differences such as culture-loaded words and idioms, building a bridge for transmitting the culture information between the source language and target language. In communicative dimension, Goldblatt utilizes amplification and omission methods, makes the communicative intention of the source text embody in the translation text, making the translation have high degree of holistic adaptation and selection, and achieving perfect communication and translation effects. In addition, the research of this thesis proves the feasibility and value of approach to Translation as Adaptation and Selection on guiding the translation practice to some extent.