A Study On Howard Goldblatt’s Strategies In Translating Liu Zhenyun’s Cell Phone

Howard Goldblatt is known as the chief translator of Chinese contemporary literature.His translation activities have made great contribution to disseminating Chinese culture and promoting cultural communication between China and western countries.There are numerous studies about Howard Goldblatt’s translation strategies as well as his translation works in recent years.However,in the current academic circles,the studies about Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Liu Zhenyun’s works are insufficient.In addition,hardly any scholars nowadays explore Howard Goldblatt’s translation strategies in reproducing linguistic expressions and cultural elements as well as in reconstructing the form of the source text simultaneously.Based on theories of explicitation,implicitation,domestication and foreignization this thesis explores Howard Goldblatt’s strategies in translating Liu Zhenyun’s Cell Phone from the perspectives of both content and form through qualitative and quantitative analysis.More specifically,the thesis explores the characteristics and motivations of Howard Goldblatt’s explicitation and implicitation strategies of the linguistic expressions,his domestication and foreignization strategies of the idioms,as well as his domestication strategy of the paragraphs of Cell Phone respectively.The main findings of this study are as follows.Firstly,in order to improve the readability and acceptability of Cell Phone,Howard Goldblatt has adopted explicitation and implicitation strategies to translate the linguistic expressions.Explicitation strategy is achieved by addition and explanation,while implicitation strategy is achieved by omission and generalization.Statistically,Howard Goldblatt has resorted to addition for twenty three times,explanation for thirty five times,omission for seven times as well as generalization for four times to reproduce the linguistic expressions of Cell Phone.This has embodied that supplemented by translation strategy of implicitation,explicitation is the dominant translation strategy adopted by Howard Goldblatt.Secondly,in order to promote the dissemination of Cell Phone,combining with foreignizaiton,Howard Goldblatt employs domestication strategy torender the cultural elements of idioms.Domestication strategy is realized by free translation and foreignization strategy is realized by literal translation.According to the statistics,Howard Goldblatt has resorted to free translation for eighty one times and literal translation for seventeen times to reproduce the idioms of the source text.This has embodied that Howard Goldblatt’s translation strategy of domestication predominates over foreignization.Thirdly,in order to cater for target readers’ reading habits and aesthetic taste,Howard Goldblatt has employed domestication strategy to split,merge as well as simultaneously split and merge the paragraphs of Cell Phone.The statistics have shown that the translator has split the paragraphs for nineteen times,merged the paragraphs for seventy four times as well as simultaneously split and merged the paragraphs for twenty one times respectively.This has reflected that Howard Goldblatt prefers to employ domestication to merge rather than split and simultaneously split and merge the paragraphs.Translation is a communicative activity across languages and cultures.An attempt to study Howard Goldblatt’s translation strategies from content,including linguistic expressions and cultural elements,as well as form contributes to a better and deeper understanding of his translation strategies and motivations,and provides some implications for the translation of Chinese literature and even for Chinese literature “going global”.