On Translation Strategies And Methods In Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out

It is well-known that the masterpiece of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out(hereafter referred to as Life) wins Mo Yan the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. The translator of this masterpiece, Howard Goldblatt, is regarded as the most important promoter of the work in achieving this award. The long novel describes the rural history of the second half of the 20 th century in China. It contains the depictions of ecological geographic, material culture, religious belief, customs and habits. This novel is full of rich knowledge of China, such as the ancient and modern history of China, the poetry, idioms, Xiehouyu, quotes and well-known sayings and so on, which bring the translator with great challenges in the translation.Bassnett’s Cultural Translation Theory contains three sub-theories of Culture Functional Equivalence Theory, Manipulation Theory and Cultural Construction Theory. The term of cultural translation includes two connotations, one is the cultural factors or elements in the translation process and the other is the translation itself as a culture. The theory utilized in this thesis is Culture Functional Equivalence Theory, which is concerned with the former connotation of cultural translation. This theory specifies that the cultural factors must be taken into account in the translation process, because language has an inseparable relationship with the social culture it is loaded in. The functional equivalence is a matter of expediency because the equivalences in the lexicon and grammatical structure are difficult to reach for the translator. Therefore, the translator has to carry out cultural transformation in order to make the target text with the equivalent cultural function in the target culture as that of the source text in the original culture.The author analyzes the translation strategies and their corresponding methods in the translation of Life under the guidance of Culture Functional Equivalence Theory. Through the exploration of the strategies of domestication and foreignization firstly proposed by Laurence Venuti and the corresponding translation methods, such as Dryden’s imitation, Lefevere’s variation method, and so on, the author tries to find the cultural motivation of the translator. As every translation has its advantages and disadvantages, borrowing the terms of over-translation and under-translation proposed by Peter Newmark, the author surveys the defects in this translation because of inappropriate usage of domestication or foreignization under the guidance of Culture Functional Equivalence Theory. With this study, the author provides a new perspective in the study of the English version of Life and shows the strong explanatory power of this theory in the translation studies of literary works. She finds that the appropriate options of the translation strategies and the corresponding methods mainly attribute to the translator’s deep understanding and accurate elaboration of the cultural factors behind the text. In order to realize the translation strategies,the translator adopts a variety of translation methods, for example, he adopts free translation, imitation, variation, recreation, omission, etc. to realize domestication, and he adopts literal translation, transliteration, transliteration plus annotation and so on to realize foreignization. Neither the strategies nor the methods are chosen by him in random, but with his rigorous consideration of obtaining the functional equivalence between the two cultures.The author introduces the background and the target of this research at the beginning. Then, she sorts the previous studies both at home and abroad on Culture Functional Equivalence Theory and on the English version of Life. After the literature review, she provides the theoretical framework, including a brief study of the theory and an analysis of domestication and Foreignization with their corresponding methods under the theory. Next, combining with the comparative reading of the Chinese and English versions of the classic novel, she explores the application of domestication, foreignization and the corresponding methods under the theoretical frame. Borrowing the terms of over-translation and under-translation firstly proposed by Peter Newmark, the author discusses the disadvantages in this translation because of inappropriate application of domestication or foreignization. These disadvantages are mainly reflected in the non-equivalence in cultural functions between the ST and the TT. Finally, the author concludes her main findings of the research and provides some suggestions for further study on this subject.