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

Being supported by literary works and assisted by translation, literary translation tries to convey the literary work, cultural features, value and ideas and more in a certain country to people of another country. There are many excellent literary works in China, but the number of works that has gained the worldwide fame is relatively small. One of reasons is the quality of translation. In the literary translation, the translator needs to consider many questions: Whether the selected work will be accepted by foreign readers, whether the translated version will achieve the translator’s anticipated effect, and what translation strategies the translator should adopt for the selected text and so on. It is the reason why Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Red Sorghum is taken as the case to be discussed and explored in this thesis.Red Sorghum is one of Mo Yan’s representative works, which is also one of his works that has been translated into numerous foreign languages. Goldblatt’s English version is very popular among western readers, which also gives a hand to promote Mo Yan’s works to walk onto the world’s literary stage.Goldblatt’s translation is famous for his bold and flexible attitude. He deletes, rewrites and adjusts the original text autonomously, which is similar to the ideas of Andre Lefevere’s rewriting theory. Lefevere thinks that translation is a rewriting of the original text. All rewritings, no matter what their purposes are, reflect a certain ideology and poetics, and they manipulate literature to function in a given society in a certain way. And such rewriting is usually manipulated by three factors:ideology, poetics and patronage, and these three factors often mix up to affect the process and effect of translation.Guided by the rewriting theory, this thesis analyzes rewritings in Red Sorghum from four major aspects:ideology, culture, society and textual structure. In each part, this paper will classify more detailed aspects, that is, it will discuss ideological contents from politics, religion and sex-related contents; Cultural contents consist of culture-loaded words, Chinese idioms and Chinese dirty words; Social contents involve Chinese salutations for people, number and Chinese traditional clothes; And textual structure studies paragraph reconstruction and deletion. Along with analysis of some examples in the novel, this thesis will explain rewriting reasons, summarize the corresponding translation strategies and discuss effects of his rewritings. Based on such research, this thesis tries to explore deeply Goldblatt’s attitude and idea for Chinese literary translation, and also it refers to a discussion and trial of applying Lefereve’s rewriting theory into practice.At last, this thesis applies the qualitative research method and uses some methods, such as classification, exemplification, comparison, description, interpretation and summary and so on.