On The Translation Studies Of Vulgar Language In Red Sorghum

Red Sorghum, an excellent piece of work written by Mo Yan in 1986, has played an influential role in the world literature and has been translated into over twenty languages. It is worthy of being studied. In the course of research, the author finds that there exists much vulgar language in Red Sorghum, which is an important part of Chinese native cultures. Through research it is found that vulgar language in Red Sorghum can be categorized into three groups, namely, vulgar language in presenting sex, vulgar language in describing behaviors and vulgar language in cursing others. By way of reading and comparison, the author finds that it poses great challenges to reproduce the connotations and flavor of vulgar language in the translated work.The thesis attempts to apply the Newmark's Translation Theory to the translation studies of vulgar language in Red Sorghum. First of all, the thesis reveals the deep native cultural meanings contained in the case examples collected from the original text. Then comparative analysis is conducted between Mo Yan's original work and the English version of the Howard Goldblatt. At last, Newmark's language functions as well as his communicative and semantic translation methods are adopted for analysis. By way of research, it is discovered that Howard Goldblatt doesn't fully display the vulgar language in the source text, the main reasons of which are the great cultural disparities between China and America and Howard Goldblatt' s limitations in understanding Chinese native cultures. Howard Goldblatt's translation on part of the vulgar language in Red Sorghum fails to achieve the communicative goal. Therefore, Howard Goldblatt's translation on the vulgar language in Red Sorghum is indeed worthy of being discussed.