A Study On English Translation Of Folklore Words In Tales Of Hulan River From A Cognitive Translation Perspective

Xiao Hong is a genius woman writer with unique literary creativity in the history of modern Chinese literature. Her novel The field of Life and Death was published in the 1930s, and shocked the Chinese literary world,thus earning a reputation for the "Anti-Japanese war writer". Tales of Hulan River is her representative work in her later life, which has a very high literary value. As a female autobiographical literature, Tales of Hulan River contains unique individual emotion,describes a picture of local customs and practices from various aspects by recalling all sorts of the local people and happenings in her hometown. Although many domestic scholars have studied this novel, few people have studied its English translation.Howard Goldblatt is "the chief translator of Chinese contemporary literature, and has translated 40 literary works by 25 Chinese contemporary writers into English. He has made a great contribution to the cultural exchanges between China and the West through Chinese literature translation and research. Howard Goldblatt began to study Xiao Hong' s literary works since 1970s.He has translated many of her literary works into English and wrote Hsiao Hung. He has a deep study of Xiao Hong, either of her writing style and stylistic skills, or of her life background and experience. Tales of Hulan River is Howard Goldblatt's first translation work of Xiao Hong, which is strongly representative of his personal translation style. The most striking feature of Howard Goldblatt's translation is his respect for the original without fear of it and his translation is full of creativity and flexibility.The author of this thesis bases her study on cognitive linguistic view on translation, using multiple embodied interactions, creativity of the cognitive subjects and the translation principle of"Two worlds" to analyze and discuss the translation of folklore words in Tales of Hulan River,which involves multiple interactions, including the interaction between the translator and the source language, the interaction between the translator and the target language, the interaction between the translator and the original author, and the interaction between the translator and the target language language readers. This thesis focuses on the translation of vocabularies concerned with the folk discourse, folk activities and folk features in Goldblatt's version, and through sufficient exemplification and analysis, demonstrates that the translators have to combine the interactive relations among the reality, the author, the translator, and the reader closely, and to give full consideration to the effects of embodiment and cognition, and that the translators are also required to deal with these relations stated above properly in order to better understand the translation nature, and ultimately achieve a harmonious translation.The significance of the research is to verify the applicability of cognitive linguistic view on translation in the translation of Chinese literary works and provide adequate exemplification through the analysis of Goldblatt' s translation process, the result of which can provide more useful experience for future translation of Chinese literary works as well as a new perspective for similar translation studies in order to render translated works more acceptable to the target language readers.