A Relevance Translation Theoretic Approach To The English Translation Of Indigenous Information In Mi Of Su Tong

Mi is one of the Maple-Poplar Village series novels created by Su Tong.The novel was filmed and showed on in 2004,which started the domestic gray themed movie.Mi was translated into many languages,and the only existing English version Rice was translated by Howard Goldblatt,who is known as the most authoritative Chinese literary translator in the Western world.Aside from the delicate depiction of human nature,the rich indigenous information is also the highlight of Mi.Naturally,how to realize the smooth communication within different cultural circles while put the indigenous information into translation practice is critical.In addition,the current academic research on the translation of the indigenous information in Mi is merely in the blank,but with the establishment of the database,the research on translation pattern of indigenous information in the novels which are created by Howard Goldblatt will become evidence-based.For the reasons above,this research takes Mi and its English translation Rice as the research objects,in light of the Relevance Translation Theory by Gutt,the exploration on the translation pattern of indigenous information in Mi is developed.With the establishment of a small bilingual database,combining the classification idea on indigenous information of He Yuanjian,the analysis is expanded.Summarize the translation pattern of indigenous information from the perspective of the Relevance Translation Theory and then compare with the research results of He Yuanjian.Also,it is worth mentioning that the translation strategy synthesization is applied creatively.What is more,when Howard Goldblatt deciphers the indigenous information in other Chinese novels.To this end,the translation study of indigenous information is enhanced.The research found that:(1)there are 467 indigenous information in Mi,which can be divided into four categories: language,society,materials and superstition,and the number of each category presents as 152,93,168 and 54 respectively.(2)Paraphrasing,trans-coding,substitution,deletion and synthesization are applied.The number of paraphrasing topped the statistic results,and then followed trans-coding,substitution,while deletion and synthesization were least used.(3)Five translation strategies for indigenous information applied in Rice shows the translation patterns like paraphrasing(62.7%)> trans-coding(18.2%)> substitution(10.9%)> deletion(5.6%)> synthesization(2.8%)(“>”means more than).The translation pattern used by Howard Goldblatt is basically the same as He Yuanjian's research results,since the only difference is the application of synthesization in Rice.The translation pattern of indigenous information in all the translated versions by Howard Goldblatt are in full accord.To sum up,it shows that when Howard Goldblatt translates the works of the different writers or different works of the same writer,the translation pattern is the same,which reveals the translation style of Howard Goldblatt.