A Study On Creative Treason In Howard Goldblatt's Translation Of Tales Of Hulan River From The Perspective Of Sociosemiotics

Tales of Hulan River is a representative work of Xiao Hong,who is a famous novelist in modern and contemporary times.She describes the social features and customs of Hulan county from the 1920 s to 1930 s with a unique artistic approach,disclosing local peasants' ignorance and tragic fates in the feudal system.The famous translator and sinologist,Howard Goldblatt translates Xiao Hong's representative work Tales of Hulan River in his early years.Nowadays,the English translation of Tales of Hulan River gradually has recently been catching the attention of Chinese scholars.The translation provides an important reference of exporting traditional Chinese culture into other countries.This paper takes the English version Tales of Hulan River as the research object,uses sociosemiotics as the theoretical guidance to analyze how the translator conveys referential,linguistic and pragmatic meaning and what translation strategies the translator adopts.According to the sociosemiotic theory,meanings of linguistic signs can be divided into three categories: referential meaning,linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning.Referential meaning refers to the relationship between a linguistic symbol and the thing,phenomena,nature or behavior it describes.It refers to the external world which the word,sentence and text reflect.Linguistic meaning refers to the relation between the language signs themselves.It is the meaning of language on phonetic,lexical and syntactic levels.Pragmatic meaning refers to the relation between the sign and the sign user.It reflects information about thespeaker such as identity,age,social status,attitude,intention and so on.Translation is always a kind of treason.The translator will be unavoidably affected by factors such as recipients and receptive environment.This paper gives a brief introduction to the studies on English translation of Tales of Hulan River at home and abroad in the literature review in the literature review.The development and research contents of sociosemiotics,the definition of creative treason,the reasons for its occurrence as well as the interrelationship between sociosemiotics and creative treason are discussed in detail in the second part.Based on the linguistic features of Tales of Hulan River like the use of folk songs,poems,dialects,onomatopoeia,parallelism,simile and idiom,this paper analyzes how the translator achieves creative treason at the referential,linguistic and pragmatic levels from the perspective of sociosemiotics in the specific translation examples from the perspective of sociosemiotics.Translation concerns the transformation,interpretation and representation of signs.It is impossible for translators to be completely faithful to the original text and sometimes they have to adopt creative treason to avoid cultural conflicts.After a comparative analysis of the original and the translated works,Goldblatt adopts domestication,foreignization in conveying the referential meaning of appellation,religious words and material nouns.Linguistic meaning is mainly embodied in the phonological,lexical and syntactical levels.Goldblatt applies some translation strategies like addition,deletion,conversion and structure adjustment.The pragmatic meaning is particularly rich and complicated.Goldblatt tends to use translation methods like substitution,edition,addition and foreignization to maintain similar communicative effects and cater to the foreign reader's taste.