| The creation of literary works is always closely connected with culture and their relationship can be compared to the one of blood and flesh. Against the background of globalization of Chinese culture and literature, the dissemination of either of them can be boiled down to literary translation or cultural translation.Folklore as a key component of Chinese culture boasts a history of thousands of years. Its emergence and evolvement always relate to the production and living of Chinese people and it is the real reflection of them. As for the creation of literature, it always extracts and distils materials from situations of production and living at that time. It goes without saying that literary works abound with folk things and phenomena. Translating source literature into target cultural system is sure to confront the challenge of folklore rendering.At present, the issue of folklore rendering is attracting great attention in the circle of translation study and practitioners of translation. The focus of them is currently on how to transfer the folk information carried by the folk words & expressions, things and phenomena, i.e. the strategies of translation——alienation and domestication.As for the translation quality assessment (TQA for short) on folk elements, there is no exploration that has been carried out. TQA is of great importance to translation study and the focus of it In terms of the translation strategy, either alienation or domestication per se their interest lies in how to render the cultural information in translated text (TT for short) effectively, rather than creating new works, so the foundation of them is fidelity. Predictably, along with the practising of the strategy of globalizing Chinese literature, there will be a great number of literary works being translated into foreign languages and the issue of evaluating the quality of them should not be neglected apart from the study of translational strategies of folklore.Regarding TQA, conventionally, it is characterized by binary evaluation, i.e. good/poor; acceptable/unacceptable, faithful/unfaithful, and so forth. Actually, these pairs of assessments are rather fuzzy and it is not an appropriate and objective way to evaluate the quality of translations with binary judges. Besides, in the practice of translation, the goal of achieving complete equivalence between TT and ST can hardly be attained and it is just an ideal that the practitioners of translation are always trying to make it come true.In our physical world, there are a great many of fuzzy phenomena and their differences are not clear-cut. For example, goodness and badness, beautifulness and ugliness, loyalty and disloyalty, etc. It is obvious that these pairs of criteria are so fuzzy that binary judges are not appropriate to distinguish them.In response to this need of an effective method for measuring fuzzy phenomena, in 1965 Zadeh presented his solution——fuzzy sets——based on which Fuzziology forms. In line with its principle, degree of membership is an effective method to distinguish fuzzy phenomena finely. Regarding the assessment of translation quality, the fuzzy relationship of between TT and ST can be described in detail and objectively with degree of membership.This investigation is going to employ the degree of membership to evaluate the degree of equivalence of the folk words and idioms in the TT of the novel of Red Sorghum written by Mo Yan. It is well-known that most of themes of Mo Yan's novels are on the countryside and the characters, stories, events, etc. in his novels are all relevant to the Northeast Township of Gaomi County fictionalised by him. Therefore, there are rich folk elements in them. As for the criteria for measure the folk words and idioms, four parameters are set to evaluate the degree of equivalence, i.e. referential meaning, connotative meaning, social meaning, affective meaning picked out from the framework of Leech's semantic theory. The issues on which this investigation is going to shed light are as follows:1. Can the translations of folklore in TT be equivalent to the ones in Red Sorghum? If yes, to what extent they are equivalent?2. Can we find some method(s) to assess the equivalence easily? If yes, to what extent?In line with the average numerical values of the degree of membership, the translations of folk words and idioms in TT enjoy a quite high degree of equivalence which is 6.2. Besides, as for the four levels of meanings, the degree of equivalence of referential meaning is about 0.7 which is the highest; the degrees of equivalence of the other three derivative meanings are relatively low:0.64 (connotative meaning),0.57 (social meaning), 0.49 (affective meaning). It is safe to infer, on the basis of the data above, that Howard Goldblatt achieves this degree of equivalence of TT through striving to transfer the referential meaning of folk words and idioms. This practice reflects, on the one hand, he values the fidelity of TT and on the other hand, he makes full use of the role of context for these words and idioms are in the contexts rather than decontextualized ones.The implications of this investigation can be summarized from two dimensions:theoretically, it justifies the practicability of fuzziology in TQA and its efficacy to discover the real relationship between TT and ST objectively; practically, rendering the referential meaning of folk words and idioms is an effective method to keep TT faithful and transfer the folk connotations they carry in full measure. |
PDF Full Text Request