Remarks On Howard Goldblatt’s Translation Strategies In Frog From The Bourdieusian Field Perspective

With the cultural turn in translation studies,more and more attention has been transferred from texts to translators and their social networks,with a keen interest on how environment affects translators and the other way around.Pierre Bourdieu extended his sociology concepts of field,capital and habitus to cultural production,which can serve as a good tool of investigating a translator’s social networks and his translation habitus.With the piling-up of high-quality works,writer Mo Yan and translator Howard Goldblatt has accumulated abundant symbolic capital and secured a niche in the US literary field,where translated literature stays at an inferior position.In the process,Howard Goldblatt has formed his own translator’s habitus of being Target Text-oriented and US readers-oriented,and valuing both faithfulness and creativity.Frog─a work combining Mo Yan’s writing and Howard Goldblatt’s translating,and one that touches upon one-child policy and the forces of history and humanity─is warmly applauded in the US media and among critics and the reading public,while some people have aired different voices as regard to its writing style and translation quality.This thesis employs the theory of field and habitus,and analyzes the translation strategies of Frog.To be more specific,it focuses on how Howard Goldblatt strikes a balance between faithfulness and creativity in translating characters’ names,doggerel,sentences with rhetorical devices,“sensitive” expressions and culture-loaded words to make his work “readable,accessible and marketable”(Goldblatt 2002).