A Study Of Metadiscourse From The Perspective Of Reception Rhetoric

Chinese novelist Mo Yan received Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012. Apart from the influence that most of his works have become best sellers in many bookstores, translators of his works and different language versions, especially English versions, have been studied in academic world in order to decode good translations. Most of current studies focus on the translation strategies and the behaviors of the translator; however, articles analyzing the reception of translation from the perspective of reception rhetoric are in shortage.Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is one of the crucial works which lead Mo Yan to Nobel Prize, and is also the work that has received most international awards, therefore it is worth studying. However, previous studies have focused more on the translator’s behavior or initiatives presented in the English version. The reception of translated version is of vacancy. Reception rhetoric, based on modern rhetoric, has developed since 1990s and makes up the modern rhetoric’s shortcoming of emphasizing expressing rhetoric. In light of reception rhetoric, the process of translation is a process of reception-expressing-reception. The translator plays a dual role of recipient of the original text and expresser of the target text. The reception and expressing of the translator will be under the influence of receptive objective, context of reception and personal reasons.Metadiscourse, which is language element not including proposition information, is a help to air author’s opinions and connect discourses. It plays a crucial role in understanding and reception of discourse, which makes translation of metadiscourse a worthy topic. In current academic world, there is no paper observing the translation of metadiscourse in light of reception rhetoric.After conducting a bilingual parallel text analysis, two main categories of metadiscourse, i.e., interactive metadiscourse and interactional metadiscourse, are all marked in the original text and the translated one. Based on the analysis of 30 examples cited from the data, we can see that Goldblatt translated metadiscourse mainly under the principle of faithfulness but sometimes under the principle of treason for there were some degrees of omission, adaptation and addition in the translation of metadiscourse. In light of reception rhetoric, due to the receptive objective of Goldblatt, which is "introduction", his translation is faithful to the original text as much as possible. However, there is no strict correspondence between English and Chinese, and readers of target language have its own reading habit, so Goldblatt had to conduct treason but still on the basis of faithfulness. The success that he can accept the original text and he is able to express an authentic version is owing to his master of Chinese and English and his many years of translation practice.Through analysis of metadiscourse in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, the importance of metadiscourse translation is proved in reception and expression. References and implications are offered to the English translation for the modern and contemporary literature of China. What’s more, this paper enriches the research of metadiscourse and reception rhetoric.