Research On English Translation Of The Local Culture In Tales Of Hulan River From The Perspective Of Readers’ Response Theory

Xiao Hong, an outstanding representative of Chinese female writers in the history of contemporary Chinese literature, is regarded as the “Goddess of the Luohe River” in the 1930 s. Her works are featured with splendid sentiment, profound thoughts, and exquisite writing style. Hulanhe Zhuan is her best-known masterpiece. Hulanhe Zhuan is also featured with the expression of local language, description of folk culture and the prose-like style, which endow it unique charm. Mao Dun once praised it as “a narrative poem, a colorful landscape painting and a series of sad lullabies”. There is only one English version so far, which is translated by Howard Goldblatt, the foremost translator of modern and contemporary Chinese literary works. Tales of Hulan River witnesses the beginning of Howard Goldblatt’s journey of Chinese literature translation, which opens a window for the foreign readers to learn the customs of northeastern China.Translation plays an indispensable role during the cross-cultural communication. The faithful conveying of the content and style of original work has become a focus in translation study. However, Nida holds that the target a translation work serves is the readers or receptors. To judge a translated work, people should compare the response of target readers with that of the original readers, and find out whether they have similar readers’ response. Nida’s Readers’ Response Theory focuses on that translators should take the target readers’ receptivity into full consideration and seek equivalent readers’ response.This research employs Nida’s Readers’ Response Theory as the theoretical framework and analyzes Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Tales of Hulan River from three aspects, namely local language, folk culture and communication dimension, to probe into whether the translation has achieved equivalent readers’ response at target readers’ language habit, cognition, aesthetic values, feelings and emotions.The research has found out that Howard Goldblatt has adopted flexible strategies in the translation of Tales of Hulan River to seek a similar readers’ response in both the content and style. While on the cultural dimension that cannot find equivalent expressions in the target language, Howard Goldblatt has not conveyed the folk culture successfully by adopting domestication. The author hopes that this thesis could give a new perspective for the research on the English version Tales of Hulan River, and suggests that based on the target readers’ response, translators should also pay attention to the transmission of folk culture. It is still hoped to provide a certain reference value for the literature translation practice under the guidance of Readers’ Response Theory, especially when dealing with the folk culture.