A Study Of The English Translation Of Shouhuo From The Perspective Of Intertextuality

Yan Lianke is the first contemporary Chinese writer who won the Franz Kafka Prize.In recent years,his works have been translated into more than 30 languages.His representative work,Shouhuo,was published in China in 2004.The English translation of Shouhuo,which is entitled as Lenin’s Kisses in 2012,soon attracted the attention of the Chinese literary translation field,and the research value of the English version is self-evident.Based on the theory of intertextuality,this paper takes Lenin’s Kisses,the English version of Shouhuo,as the research object and turns the research perspective to the dynamic and open intertextuality network.By adopting the methods of literature review analysis,descriptive case study and induction,the paper analyzes how Carlos Rojas and Yan Lianke promote Carlos Rojas’ recognition and active acceptance of the intertextuality information in Shouhuo through the intertextuality dialogue in three stages of pre-translation,translation and post-translation,and how Carlos Rojas interprets the intertextuality information in Shouhuo and the possible challenges he may encounter as a translator.The intertextual translation strategies adopted by Carlos Rojas in his translation of Shouhuo from the three dimensions of cultural-loaded words intertextuality,syntactic intertextuality and thematic intertextuality,link the text with the former text and the whole socio-cultural context in which the text is located.It is found that the translator mainly adopts intertextuality translation strategies such as parody,quotation and allusion etc.at the lexical level,imitation,reference and annotation etc.at the syntactic level,and implication,denotation and plagiarism etc.at the thematic level when translating the source text.Through theoretical description and corpus analysis,the author finds that Carlos Rojas’ translation of culturally distinctive words and expressions not only focuses on the correspondence of language forms,but also bases on the socio-cultural background.The translation not only relies on the content of the source language,but also highlights the multiple intertextuality among the source language text,the target language text and the hypertext.For the text translation of verbal expression,the translation is related to the social and cultural background and the original appearance of life in eastern and western Henan in the original text,and pays attention to the correspondence of the external form and connotation of the language,so as to achieve the harmonious intertextuality effect with the original text as far as possible.For textthemed translation,the target text realizes the thematic reconstruction and representation of the original text through intertext with the original text,highlighting the thematic effect of the original text.To some extent,this study can inspire translators to pay attention to the intertextuality between source language and target text in translation,so as to better complete translation practice,and also provide reference for Carlos Rojas’ subsequent studies on English translation.