Study Of Howard Goldblatt’s Translation Of Luotuo Xiangzi From The Perspective Of Mona Baker’s Narrative Theory

With the combination of narrative theory and other disciplines,more and more scholars introduce narrative concept into translation studies,opening up a new research perspective for translatology.Among them,Mona Baker’s narrative theory is one of the typical representatives.In her Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account(Mona Baker,2006),she proposed the four framing strategies to facilitate renarrative in target texts.Luotuo Xiangzi,as the classic work of Lao She,reveals the poor and miserable life of people at the bottom in old Peking during 1920 s and 1930 s.Lao She,a renowned “People’s Artist”,occupies a prominent position in the Chinese literary arena.Among the five English versions,Rickshaw Boy,translated by Howard Goldblatt and published in 2010,is the last version currently.Compared with the previous ones,Rickshaw Boy is the most faithful to the original with less adaptation.To some extent,Howard Goldblatt has aroused the English world’s renewed attention on the classic Luotuo Xiangzi.Mona Baker’s narrative theory is employed for the research in the analysis of the reframing strategies adopted in Rickshaw Boy.Through the comparison between the original and target texts sentence by sentence,the author draws the conclusion that Howard Goldblatt applies the four framing strategies,including spatial framing,selective appropriation of textual material,framing by labelling and repositioning of participants.Firstly,as to the strategy of spatial framing,the translator adopts localization in the units of money,length,and weight to better serve target readers.Secondly,as for the strategy of selective appropriation of textual material,the translator enhances readability by adding and omitting text.Thirdly,the translator labels the novel title,names of characters and other lexical words and realizes renarrative.Finally,the translator realizes the repositioning of participants both in the paratext and within the text.Through renarrative,Howard Goldblatt achieves relative faithfulness to the original text and changes of the novel’s literariness.For the original,the wording is short and compact,vivid in description and ease in style,enabling readers to feel personally on the scene;while the language of the translation is calm and objective by comparison,alienating the distance between the novel and readers and leaving space to readers.