The Analysis Of The Translation Of Wolf Totem From The Perspective Of Sociosemiotics

Wolf Totem, a semi-autobiography written by Jiang Rong, was published in April,2004.The author gives a vivid description of the Mongolian wolves and the unique nomadic culturewhich bears strong color of national culture. And the ecological consciousness embodied inthis book is universally acknowledged by people all over the world. The novel caused a bighit after its release. In2008, the English version of the novel, translated by Howard Goldblatt,was launched and distributed internationally, achieving an unprecedented success of theexport of Chinese books. Wolf Totem was honored with the first Man Asian Literary Prize in2007and it therefore becomes a representative to promote Chinese culture to the world. Theanalysis of the translation strategies and the evaluation of this translation work are of vitalsignificance to explore a road to globalization of Chinese contemporary literature.Sociosemiotics originated and developed on the basis of semiotic theories of Saussureand Pierce, which argues that language has socialized characteristics and the interpretation oflanguage shall be placed in the concrete social context. Nida is the first one to introducesociosemiotics in the translation field, with the belief that the theory contributes to a profoundcomprehension of the vocabulary as well as the meaning of figurative devices. Later, with thegradual development of the theory, more things are taken into consideration in the translationprocess, including social and cultural background, concrete context of a text, social structureand subjective factors such as gender, age, religious faith of the translator, as well as theacceptability and aesthetic sentiment of the target readers. Hence sociosemiotics grows into acomprehensive approach of translation study. This paper will make an analysis and evaluationof the translation of Wolf Totem based on Morris‘trichotomy of semiotic meanings, namelyreferential meaning, linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning. Along with it, Halliday andKress‘s consideration of context, social structure, the subjectivity of the interpreters andNida‘s concern of acceptability of target readers are also taken into account.From the analysis, Morris‘trichotomy of semantic meaning is comprehensive anddistinct. It can be widely applied to the translation study and help evaluate the translation quality on the three dimensions. Moreover, the popularity of Wolf Totem throws some light onthe―go-out‖of Chinese contemporary literature. Translator shall hold a panoramic view,taking all the influencing factors into consideration simultaneously. He/she should strike abalance between the faithfulness of the source text and the acceptability of target readers soas to achieve cross-cultural communication. In spite of the high quality of translation work,vigorous promotion and outstanding marketing of the press are also indispensable factors.However, the approach of sociosemiotics is so all-encompassing that it is relatively onerousto handle. Moreover, there is still no concrete and systematic method to follow under theapproach.