A Study Of English Translation Of Sandalwood Death From The Perspective Of Hermeneutic Motion Theory

The work "Sandalwood Death" is one of Nobel prize winner Mo Yan's classical masterpieces with the abundant cultural connotations, which uncovers such Chinese typical implicit culture as penalty culture and officialdom culture and praises Chinese authentic vernacular culture, embodying a kind of Chinese unique cultural charm and artistic value. After Goldblatt's English version of Sandalwood death is published, it is well accepted by the western scholars.Based on the hermeneutic motion theory, this thesis takes Goldblatt's translation of Sandalwood Death as the research object, using typical examples to analyze how every step of Goldblatt's translation of Sandalwood Death is operated in terms of George Steiner's four translation steps of hermeneutic motion: trust, aggression, incorporation and compensation. The initiative step is trust. All translation activities begin with trust, namely, the translator's trust of the original author and the original work, thereby believing that the original work has the translation value and beginning translation practice activities. The second step is aggression.The translator invades the original work to understand the author's intention. The third step is incorporation. The translator incorporates the form and meaning, adopting different translation strategies to incorporate his understanding of the language of the original work and the author's intention into the target language. The final step is compensation. Due to language and culture differences and different translation strategies, it is inevitable to lead to translation losses in the second step “ aggression ” and third step "incorporation ” of translation activities, so the translator needs to perfect the translation by means of compensation at the linguistic, aesthetic and cultural levels so as to obtain good readers' acceptation and realize the functional equivalence between the original text and the English version.By analyzing the process of translating Sandalwood Death by Goldblatt, this thesis finds that all steps of the translator's trust, aggression, incorporation, and compensation have been successfully operated, thus revealing the manifestation of hermeneutic motion theory in the translation process of Sandalwood Death, promoting the translation to the cultural level, and achieving the fusion of horizons between the original reader and the target reader which can play a vital role in the transmission of Chinese culture and also provide a valuable reference for the translation of Chinese national and cultural novels and thus boosting the “ going out " pace of Chinese literature.