An Analysis Of Goldblatt's Translation Of Tales Of Hulan River In The View Of Rewriting Theory

Hulan He Zhuan,a representative work by a modern Chinese authoress Xiao Hong,depicts the local customs and practices in the small town of Hulan River in China's northeastern border.It is a narrative poem,and a colorful genre painting,containing considerable cultural information about Northeast China.Therefore,iTranslating such a work into English is by no means an easy task,but after all Howard Goldblatt,known as "a recognized chief translator in contemporary Chinese literature",translates the work successfully.However,a large number of studies about Goldblatt's translations of Mo Yan's works are carried out in recent years.This thesis,through analyzing Goldblatt's translation of Xiao Hong's Hulan He Zhuan,may provide a new angle for researching Goldblatt's translations,and promote the spread of Chinese literature and cultural exchange.In the 1970s,there appeared "a cultural turn" in translation studies.Translation is for the first time studied in a broader social and cultural context,and Lefevere's rewriting theory is a representative theory of "cultural turn".The theory argues that the translator is bound to be influenced by ideology,poetics and patronage during the process of translation,and "unfaithfully" rewrites the original text.According to this theory,the process of translation is the translator's manipulation of the source text for a particular purpose.This thesis makes a study of the specific manipulation and rewriting in Goldblatt's Tales of Hulan River,and summarizes the translation strategies based on Lefevere's rewriting theory.After a comparative analysis of the original and its translated version,the author of the thesis collects 75 corpora,and abstracts the most typical and newest ones as the target corpora and classified them in accordance with the three constraints of rewriting theory:ideology,poetics and patronage.Data concerning ideology are further divided into religious belief,folk customs and other cultural items.Poetics is analyzed at three levels:vocabulary,sentence and discourse.And patronage's manipulation is mainly analyzed from the perspective of educational institution and the publishing house.Employing methods like description,comparative analysis,and induction and so on,the thesis author analyzes how the translator rewrites the work,and the reasons for and benefits of the rewriting based on rewriting theory and makes a summary of his translation strategies.The present study finds that,firstly,Goldblatt mainly adopts the strategy of domestication,and does some rewriting and adjustment from both macro and micro perspectives;secondly,in order to make sure of the reader's acceptability,he adheres to the reader-centered principle by adopting the following translation methods such as,substitution,deletion,addition,liberal translation,and literal translation plus explanation;thirdly,although Goldblatt's translation is full of wisdom,there are still inappropriate translations of some culture-loaded expressions manifested in both the absence of rewriting and inappropriate rewriting of some material words and Chinese idioms.So the author also analyzes the inappropriate translations,and gives suggestions for amendment to the inaccurate translation.