Exploring The Stylistic And Cultural Representation Of The Song Mo Li Hua In English

As an internationally renowned folksong,Mo Li Hua in these days has become the symbol of traditional Chinese music,functioning as a great helper in the Chinese culture "Going Global" project and the bridge of building partnership with other cultures.In the history,however,the work is reported to have been actively depicted,adapted,and represented in the western manner.By excavating the historical archives,the author has recreated the panorama of the translation history for case study,and the thesis serves as the first attempt to reveal the case in translation studies.Based on the new model for singable translation,the author has examined and compared the source music and the eight English translations of different historical times,and connected the findings with the reception trajectory of the translations in the west.By confirming the consistency of different representing systems,the function of singable translation in the historical case thus should be born out.Specifically,by delving into the original and translations,the thesis has depicted the detailed strategies adopted by the translators of different times.The stylistic representation results from the overall diminished features from the following aspects:1)less recurrency yet more variations to decrease the original folk style,2)less plainness created by domesticated musical rhythms and rhyming patterns to break the original smooth effect,3)declining topicality and narrativity from diplomats/sinologist-initiated stage to musician-initiated stage to remove the literary quality in the original,4)more domesticated musical tokens during the musician-initiated period to eliminate the ethnic musical properties.In this process,reductionism and naturalization could be identified.To conclude,the translations by westerners,though diverged in some respects,have generally represented the song at the stylistic level.Furthermore,by investigating the signifying practices during the reception process of the translations,including paratexts,reviews,compilations,historiographies and so on,four major stereotyping strategies-binary opposition,analogy,essentialization and naturalization,have been identified with full examples.The representing practices in this process have reinforced the effect by the stylistic representation and cooperated with the stylistic representation for the shared function in the cultural representation.