A Corpus-Based Study Of The Reproduction Of Binu’s Image In The English Translation By Howard Goldblatt

Chinese writer Su Tong’s work Binu: The Myth of Meng Jiangnv retells the famous ancient myth of Meng Jiangnv which has attracted much attention.Famous American sinologist Howard Goldblatt’s translation Binu and The Great Wall further pushes “sinomania” onto the world arena.However,the research on this book and its translation has not been drawn much attention.Based on this,by conducting comparative analysis of Su Tong’s original work Binu: The Myth of Meng Jiangnv and Howard Goldblatt’s translation Binu and The Great Wall,this thesis aims to study the reproduction and distortion of Binu’s image based on the Chinese-English parallel corpus.For better analysis,this study sets “Binu” as the key word,searching all sentences including the key word in the original and collecting their respective translation sentences at the same time.Then,through investigating the translation of collocates before or after the key word “Binu”,analyzing Goldblatt’s reproduction of her image from four aspects: the reproduction of Binu’s appearance,of her behaviors,of her mental activities,and other people’s behavior towards Binu,the study reveals that,many of Binu’s vulgar behaviors and negative mental activities have been polished by Howard Goldblatt during his translation process.Through conversion or omission,he has tactfully reshaped Binu’s image from a regular woman who has some flaws in her characteristics into a goddess-like woman who is perfect.Further research tells us that two factors have led this kind of distortion: one is Howard Goldblatt’s use of translation skills,and the other is his principle of reader oriented translation.