Research On The English Version Of Sandalwood Death From The Perspective Of Manipulation Theory

Mo Yan,the winner of Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012,is also the first Chinese writer who won the prize.He is well-known as the writer of “ Root-Seeking Literature” for a series of his local works full of complex emotions,“Nostalgia”.His works involve universal human nature and human conditions by specially describing the way of life and the living conditions of the residents in his hometown,and have turned the general description of the nostalgia into the understanding and discovery of "Survival".One of his masterpieces,Sandalwood Death tells a story about the Gaomi people's anti-colonial struggle movement and an appalling torture in the background of Jiaoji Railway in Shandong province built by Germany in 1900 s.It opens a window for the readers at home and abroad to understand the folk culture in Northeast Gaomi,Shandong province.The literary works of Mo Yan are estimated to have been translated into over 40 languages.Most of the English versions are produced by Howard Goldblatt,who is hailed as “the Midwife of Chinese Modern and Contemporary Literature in English-speaking Countries”.Goldblatt holds that the translator has a variety of roles such as a disseminator,an interpreter,an editor,and that the essence of translation is a form of rewriting and compromise.Therefore,rewriting plays an indispensable role in the translation practice in view of the target readers' acceptability and the publisher' s high expectation.The English versions translated by Goldblatt win high reputations among the western publishers and readers,and Sandalwood Death is certainly noexception.However,few scholars have ever conducted studies on how the English versions are rewritten by Goldblatt.Based on the Manipulation Theory,this thesis explores how the English version of Sandalwood Death is manipulated by the three elements patronage,ideology,and poetics in Goldblatt's translation.Patronage confines the text selection while ideology affects the rewriting parts in the source text like the political information,religious culture,and local food and festival culture in Northeast Gaomi,Shandong province,and poetics is principally expressed by lexical,syntactic,semantic,and rhetorical forms.The translator has to give priority to the target readers' acceptability and the need of the target patronage,ideology,and poetics.This thesis further demonstrates that Andre Lefevere's Manipulation Theory plays an instrumental role in the translation practice and the corresponding strategies employed by Goldblatt makes the target text easier to understand.Meanwhile,it is also conducted to provide some enlightenment to the further research on C-E translation of Chinese literary works.