A Stylistic Study Of Goldblatt's Translation Of Tales Of Hulan River From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

Recently,with the development of the China's comprehensive national strength,Chinese literature has drawn more and more attention.Hulan He Zhuan is the masterpiece of Xiao Hong which has been well known around the world and won glory for her in Chinese literary world.Xiao Hong describes the local folklore of Hulan county with a special language form.As the chief American sinologist and translator,Howard Goldblatt has devoted himself to translating the modern and contemporary Chinese literature including works of Xiao Hong and Mo Yan.Howard Goldblatt is widely known by the Chinese public gradually since Mo Yan won the Nobel literature prize.So far,as the sole English version translated by Howard Goldblatt,Tales of Hulan River has not only drawn a lot of notice from overseas scholars but also made the translation works of Howard Goldblatt a hot topic among domestic scholars.However,most of the research show solicitude for translation of folk customs and culture dimension,while the corpus-based research on Tales of Hulan River from stylistic perspective is less.With stylistic methods,the thesis does a systematic analysis of the unique style of Hulan He Zhuan and its English version from the perspective of functional equivalence.Combining the qualitative and quantitative study together,the thesis analyzes two corpora which consist of the source text and its English version,named as Hulan He Zhuan and Tales of Hulan River respectively,and takes online corpus as reference.A contrastive study of the original work and its English version is extended at three levels: the lexical level,the syntactic level and the textual level.Similarities and differences are presented and the percentages of data are shown in figures and tables.Additionally,the qualitative analysis of the related examples will be followed.The thesis compares the original text with its translated text to explore the following questions:(1)To what extent does Howard Goldblatt reproduce the unique style of Hulan He Zhuan at lexical level from the perspective of Nida's Functional Equivalence?(2)To what extent does Howard Goldblatt reproduce the unique style of Hulan He Zhuan at syntactic level from the perspective of Nida's Functional Equivalence?(3)To what extent does Howard Goldblatt reproduce the unique style of Hulan He Zhuan at syntactic level from the perspective of Nida's Functional Equivalence?(4)What kind of translator's style has Howard Goldblatt shaped in his translation of Tales of Hulan River?What's more,if there are phenomenon of deceptive equivalence at the above three levels in the English version—Tales of Hulan River,the reasons for the deficiency of literary effects are examined.At the same time,attention is also paid to the translator's style that Goldblatt shaped during the translation process.The present study comes to the following major findings.To begin with,the data show that Goldblatt could not reproduce the literary effects of the original work completely.It can be found that there are cases of deceptive equivalence,failing to achieving stylistic effects and functional equivalence at three levels.What's more,Goldblatt shaped his own translator's style in the translation process of Tales of Hulan River.The data display that there are consistent and routine occurrence of expressions that Goldblatt used in translation.Goldblatt's translation shows a greater fidelity at lexical level.However,he can not reflect the characteristics of the original fiction at the syntactic level and textual level.The reasons can be explained in the following aspects: Firstly,Goldblatt's unique identity as an American Sinologist and celebrated translator in English-speaking world make him know the differences between English and Chinese well.Thus,he makes adaptation to let the translation more suitable to target readers' taste.What's more,the early translation of Goldblatt is fettered by the source-text-oriented ideology.He was so obsessed with clearly transmitting the theme of Hulan He Zhuan that he overlooked its details and stylistic effects.The findings of the present study are useful to the study of Goldblatt's translation.Meanwhile,the thesis attempts to reveal the cultural connotation of literary translation and provide references for Chinese literature's going out and cross-cultural communication.