The Loss Of "Childish Delight" In The English Version Of Cao Wenxuan’s Cao Fans Zi

The new century has witnessed the rapid development of Chinese children’s literature. Many domestic works released in recent years are qualified to compete with foreign classics. Chinese children’s literature has gotten itself well-prepared to go global and provide children in other countries with access to Chinese culture.Since the implementation of the "going global" strategy of Chinese literature in 2002, great efforts have been made for the overseas dissemination and transmission of Chinese literature. However, due to the marginalized situation of children’s literature in the whole culture industry, Chinese children’s literature takes up a very small percentage of the exports. And even though translated, quite a few works which win popularity at home fail abroad, especially in the English-speaking world.The thesis takes The Straw House, the English version of Cao Fang Zi written by Cao Wenxuan, as a case study, attempting to discuss the embarrassing situation from the perspective of translation. As a representative writer of Chinese children’s literature, Cao is expert in depicting children’s life by excellent descriptions of children’s interesting words and deeds. However, though Cao Fang Zi is acknowledged as the landmark of Chinese children’s literature, The Straw House translated by Sylvia Yu, Julian Chen and Christopher Malone has received little public’s attention in the North American book markets, and failed to arouse any scholars’ interest since its publication. Therefore, the thesis focuses on the nursery rhymes and onomatopoeias in The Straw House from the reproduction of childish delight for the first time. The study comments on the translation in terms of whether the three translators remove the language barrier and preserve childish delight of the source text, so as to provide practical suggestion for further C-E translation of children’s literature.Findings are generated as follows:on the one hand, owing to the linguistic differences between Chinese and English, Sylvia Yu et al. adopt a translation method of achieving the semantic correspondence between the source and the target nursery rhymes at the sacrifice of rhythm and rhyme. This non-versified translation does a lot of damage to the readability and literariness for children of the nursery rhymes in The Straw House. What’s worse, the three translators’ static style of translating, rather than a dynamic one which conforms to children’s active nature, also accelerates the loss of childish delight. On the other hand, the three translators apply deletion, faithful translation and addition to translating the onomatopoeias in the source text. Through the comparison of the onomatopoeias in Cao Fang Zi and The Straw House, several defects are founded. Firstly, almost half the original onomatopoeias are deleted during the translation. Secondly, indirect and secondary onomatopoeias whose sounds effects are inferior to direct onomatopoeias are overused. Third, the onomatopoeias in The Straw House lack diversity. The three defects make the translation fail to reproduce children’s interesting way of experiencing the world through various sounds, thus leading to a considerable loss of childish delight of the translation as well.