A Study Of Howard Goldblatt's Translation Strategies Of Culture-specific Items In Mo Yan's Wa(Frog)

The establishment of cultural confidence has been a particular issue in China.Since the motion is not only inward-oriented but also outward-oriented,translation activity plays an indispensable role in transmitting and disseminating Chinese culture.However,cultural gap between the source and the target language poses difficulties for translators to find an appropriate equivalent in translating culture-specific items(CSIs).In order to deal with those difficulties,many researchers have proposed diversities of translation strategies for the purpose of translating CSIs between languages,among which Aixelá's strategies are deemed as rather complete and applicable.Aixelá classifies the strategies into two categories – conservation and substitution – based on the degree of intercultural manipulation.As is closer to the original reference,the strategies in conservation group include repetition,orthographic adaptation,linguistic translation,extratextual gloss and intratextual gloss.The strategies in substitution group,with a greater degree of intercultural manipulation,include synonymy,limited universalization,absolute universalization,naturalization,deletion and autonomous creation.The 11 strategies proposed by Aixelá are applied in this study to explore an effective model for the translation of CSIs in the contemporary Chinese literary works.Moreover,Aixelá's two divided groups are used in this research to examine Howard's(the translator of the chosen text Wa)translation preference – conservation or substitution in translating CSIs.The reasons that impel the translators to choose different translation strategies are complicated.This study intends to backtrack the possible factors that influence Howard's option from the perspective of descriptive translation study(DTS)and Aixelá's proposed parameters.Since Aixelá has been influenced greatly by the DTS scholars such as Holmes and Toury,the explanatory variables of this study will involve a pendulum approach for the factors proposed by DTS and Aixelá are sometimes intercrossed and somewhere overlapping.The narrative of Mo Yan's Wa,centered on the family-planning policy,contains one of the most important periods in China(from 1950 s to 2000s).Although it sparked controversy,abundant CSIs are contained within for sure.Howard Goldblatt,the translator of this novel,has gained surging praise in the English-speaking world for his good attainment of cross-cultural manipulation.This dissertation is constituted by five chapters.In the first part,the researcher introduces the source text Wa and its author Mo Yan to manifest their notable status.The researcher also introduces the translator Howard and his translation Frog to give a clue of the hidden factors influencing the translator's choice of strategies.In addition,the objectives,significance and research questions are given in the first chapter.In the second part,the author reviews previous researches of CSIs,Howard Goldblatt's translation and Frog.In the third part,in the attempt to testify the research's validity,the author establishes the theoretical framework generally based on Aixelá and DTS,and proposes a novel classification of CSIs by drawing on the prior studies of prominent scholars such as Newmark and Nida.In the fourth part,the researcher applies the theories on the proposed classification of CSIs to verify the research questions.Finally,this paper arrives at a conclusion through the analysis in chapter five.The study finds that Howard Goldblatt tends to adopt conservation strategies rather than substitution strategies when translating CSIs,that is,he rivets more attention to the source culture.His predilection for conservation strategies results from various parameters including supratextual,intratextual parameters and the nature of the CSI.Moreover,this study proposes a translation strategy model of CSIs under the corresponding classification.