Paratexts' Promoting And Presenting Roles In Big Breasts And Wide Hips

There are many cultural elements in Mo Yan's Big Breasts and Wide Hips,and those elements are the embodiment of Chinese culture.It is necessary for the translator to present those cultural elements faithfully to target language readers.It is significant for the Chinese cultural elements to be correctly presented to target language readers,which is of great help to the Chinese culture going global initiative and to the building of Chinese cultural confidence.Average Chinese readers are familiar with those cultural elements,but this is not true for average target language readers.It is important to present those cultural elements to the target language readers faithfully and correctly,but this is not easy to accomplish.It requires certain means to present Big Breasts and Wide Hips to target language readers with different cultural background and let them accept and understand the translation.Paratexts are used in Big Breasts and Wide Hips to promote the translation Big Breasts and Wide Hips and present cultural elements in it to target language readers.The idea of paratexts is advanced by Genette,the French narratologist,and he claimed that paratexts could present a text in the form of a book,and link the text to the outside world related to this text.This author studied paratexts in Howard's translation Big Breasts and Wide Hips.The study of his paratexts is divided into two aspects:1.Paratexts's role in promoting the translation,which is the study of the role of paratexts in promoting the translation;2.The paratexts' role in presenting cultural elements,which studies the annotations' role in presenting and introducing cultural elements.There are three purposes in this thesis:1.To study paratexts' promoting role in Howard's translation Big Breasts and Wide Hips,2.To study paratexts' role in presenting cultural elements in this book,3.To analyze the merits in Howard's use of paratexts in his Big Breasts and Wide Hips.After this analysis,this author finds that:Paratexts' promoting role is focused on promoting Big Breasts and Wide Hips and Mo Yan's other works.Goldblatt's use of paratexts to promote Mo Yan works abroad is worth drawing lesson from.As to paratexts' role in presenting cultural elements,this author finds that if the identities of cultural elements are preserved and their essential meanings is provided by paratexts,the target language readers can appreciate those cultural elements in various contexts.With those basic and essential meanings,the target language readers could also identify and appreciate those cultural elements in various contexts and texts.