A Study On The Translation Of Dialect In Red Sorghum From The Perspective Of Eco-translatology

Red Sorghum is one of the representative novels written by Mo Yan, the first Nobel laureate in China. This novel, consisting of Red Sorghum, Sorghum Wine, Dog Ways, Sorghum Funeral and Strange Death, creates dozens of heroic images untempered by civilization in the background of the anti-Japanese war through usage of Gao Mi dialect. The English version of Red Sorghum was introduced into the western world in 1993 by Howard Goldblatt and enjoyed great reputation abroad. Although more and more scholars both at home and abroad have turned their eyes on the English version of Red Sorghum in recent years, few researches have been conducted on the dialect translation in it. It is of some research value in applying Eco-translatology to analyzing the translation of dialect in Red Sorghum.Eco-translatology is a brand-new theory proposed by Professor Hu Gengshen in the early 21st century. According to this theory, there are two stages in the translation process, that is, the translator's selective adaptations to the translational Eco-environment, and the translator's adaptive selections in translational Eco-environment. Therefore, this thesis is going to apply Eco-translatology to dialect translation in all chapters in Red Sorghum by establishing a bilingual database of dialectal words and combining the translator's adaptation and selection with dialect translation. As to the translator's adaptations to the translational Eco-environment, this thesis firstly discusses the features of dialect in Red Sorghum and the dialect translation difficulty and then analyzes the two stages of selective adaptation and adaptive selection in dialect translation in Red Sorghum. In the translator's adaptive selection process, the thesis makes a detailed analysis of translating dialects in Red Sorghum from linguistic dimension, communicative dimension and cultural dimension by adopting methods such as text analysis method and case study method. This thesis aims to prove Eco-translatology's applicability to dialect translation and attempts to provide a new angle for the future study of dialect translation, which is also of great realistic significance in spreading Chinese modern literature among the western countries.Through the research, the author finds that dialect translation is also a process of the translator's adaptation and selection. Due to the special functions of dialect and difficulty in dialect translation process, the translator needs to adapt to the western readers and his own bilingual and bicultural competence. As for the selection stage, the translator is supposed to fully understand the dialectal words in the novel, and use proper words to express the exact meaning but also be able to retain the colloquial language style of the original text. And in cultural dimension, the translator can resort to the strategies of "omission" and "literal translation" to overcome language and cultural barriers and ease readers' understanding difficulty. In communicative dimension, the translator can only realize the communicative effect the writer intends to achieve by means of fully grasping the aim the writer's to use dialectal words in the literary works.