A Study On Howard Goldblatt’s Translation Version Of Red Sorghum From The Perspective Of Rewriting Theory

As it is known to all, translation plays an important role in the history of communication of mankind. Traditional translation studies lay stress on text comparison and translation criteria. But in the1970s, Translation Studies School began to enter the public view and puts translation study under a broader culture circumstance. Andre Lefevere, one of the most important representatives of the Translation Studies School, is famous for his Rewriting Theory. According to Andre Lefevere, translation is a rewriting of an original text by the translator under the manipulation of three factors, namely, ideology, poetics and patronage. Lefevere’s Rewriting Theory offers the translation study a new historical and descriptive perspective.After winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mo Yan’s works have attracted wide attention from all over the world. Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu, one of most representative works of Mo Yan, was first published in1987and earned the4th Medium-length Novel Award. After that the work was translated by American Sinologist Howard Goldblatt. The English version was published in American in1993and achieved a great success. Howard Goldblatt’s translation plays an important role in the success of Red Sorghum overseas. Through the comparison between Chinese version Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu and English version Red Sorghum, readers can clearly find that Red Sorghum is not completely faithful to the original text.This thesis is a study of Howard Goldblatt’s English translation of Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu, from the perspective of Andre Lefevere’s Rewriting Theory. The thesis consists of three parts-Introduction, main body and Conclusion. In the part of Introduction, three aspects are presented including the research background, the purpose and significance of the study as well as the organization of the study. The main body is made up of three chapters. The first chapter is literature review. The second chapter mainly discusses the theoretical framework of the thesis-Lefevere’s Rewriting Theory. The third chapter is the case study which is the most important part of this thesis, focusing on the analysis of how the three factors of Rewriting Theory, i.e. ideology, poetics and patronage, affect Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu. The last part is Conclusion, in which the author concludes the major findings, limitations and recommendations.Through the analysis above, we can get the following conclusions:Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu is a kind of rewriting of the original text. And the reason for the rewriting is the manipulation of ideology, poetics and patronage factors in the target language culture. Howard Goldblatt applies many translation strategies to realize the manipulation in the translation of Hong Gao Liang Jia Zu, such as substitution, omission, addition, deletion and conversion. And these translation strategies enable the target text to conform to the target ideology and poetics as well as patronage’s requirements.