Howard Goldblatt's Translation Of Big Breasts&Wide Hips:the Perspective Of Literary Manipulation

The phenomenon of translation boasts a history of thousands of years both in China and in the West;however,translators,the writer of this history,remains ignored without due attention and respect.The focus and emphasis in traditional translation theory have almost always been on the original work and on conceptions of fidelity and equivalence.This scenario remains unchanged until the advent of the "Cultural Turn" in translation studies of the 1980s when a new wave of translation theories began to pay more attention to elements beyond language and the dominant role of translators is duly scrutinized and foregrounded.Lefevere is the flagman who initiated this shift of attention of translation studies to cultural aspects,and his theory about factors that affect translation,including poetics,patronage and ideology,ushers in a fresh perspective in the field of translation studies where many thorny issues in this field could be adequately explained.Drawing from the insights of the key assumptions in Lefevere's manipulation theory,that is poetics,patronage and ideology,this thesis seeks to explore Howard Goldblatt's English translation of Mo Yan's Big Breasts&Wide Hips.It argues that ideology shapes Howard Goldblatt's translation as much in his choice of the work for translation as in the choice of strategies and methods of dealing with elements and information related to Chinese history and politics;In terms of poetics,Howard Goldblatt's translation of Big Breasts&Wide Hips is equally affected,which can be demonstrated through the translating strategies as well as poetic's status in literary system.Finally,in the case of patronage,its impacts can be found,on the one hand,in the translator's social status,economical benefits,and on the other hand,in the translator's choice of translating context and the manipulation of patron's ideology that shapes his use of tactics of separating and integrating in the process of translationIt can therefore be concluded that literary translation,as a bridge in exchange of literary works in two different languages,needs to attend to the fact that the translated version should comply with the target readers' national ideology,meet the requirements of the target readers' dominant poetics,and yields in many ways to his patrons demands if the translated work were to be published as desired.The translator is inevitably shaped by the literary system of his culture throughout the whole translating process.The study of this thesis,additionally,offers a new perspective to interpret the original as well as to examine the translated version of Big Breasts&Wide Hips,and hopefully,it will shed lights on the study of China's C-E literary translation.