On Translation Ethics Based On The Translation Of Culture-specific Items

In recent years, “Chinese literature going out” has become a hot spot in the academic circle. The event that Mo Yan obtained the Nobel Prize further provokes the debate on how to translate Chinese literature. A lot of scholars claim that Mo Yan’s success in the western world is mainly attributed to the rewriting by the translators including Howard Goldblatt, therefore they propose that rewriting should be the main translation model when introducing Chinese literature to the West. The essence of the debate is in fact about translation ethics as it talks about Goldblatt’s fidelity. In this context, this thesis tries to investigate translator’s ethics based on the analysis of Goldblatt’s translation of culture-specific items(CSIs) in Honggaoliang so as to make some contribution to other relevant studies.This thesis adopts Chesterman’s five-model translation ethics as theoretical framework and the translation of CSIs as the main focus to investigate how Goldblatt’s choice of translation strategies reveals his ethics. As the categorization of CSIs has not reached into consensus, this thesis establishes a new taxonomy by combining several kinds of categorization proposed by other scholars. In this way, it studies all the CSIs in the novella Honggaoliang. With regard to the translation strategies, it adopts Aixela’s categorization because it is built based on the different levels of manipulation, which closely pertains to translation ethics.By conducting both qualitative and quantitative studies on the translation of CSIs in the novella, this thesis finds that during the translating process, Goldblatt adopts more conservative strategies, indicating that he has the inclination to be faithful to the source text. This result shows he has followed the ethics of representation. Meanwhile he also adopts a lot of substitutive strategies to rewrite part of the source text for the consideration of target readers and the market and the writing style of English. This behavior shows Goldblatt has abided by both ethics of service and norm-based ethics. From the proportion of the two major strategies, we can find that Goldblatt puts emphasis on both fidelity and betrayal, which will help establishing the communication between the two cultures, revealing that he has kept ethics of communication in mind.