A Study Of Folklore Translation From The Perspective Of Translator Behavior Criticism

Taking the writer Xiao Hong’s childhood experience as a clue,Tales of Hulan River depicts the social style,human feelings and local culture of Hulan town in a simple but delicate writing style from the perspective of children.The folk culture is revealed in words and sentences,forming an unique image of the town.And the English translation of such vivid image will undoubtedly enhance foreign readers’ understanding of Chinese local culture,which promotes the influence of Chinese local literature abroad.However,at present,there are few studies on its English translation and studies of the folklore translation are even sporadic.Thus,research perspective needs to be further expanded.Based on this,the thesis applies Zhou Lingshun’s translator behavior criticism as the guiding theory of the study,and combines Zhong Jingwen’s identification and classification of folklore,to analyze Goldblatt’s translator behaviors from four aspects: material folklore,spiritual folklore,social folklore and linguistic folklore.In the analysis of each aspect,the thesis analyzes Goldblatt’s translator behavior as well as the degree of truth-seeking and of utility-attaining of these behaviors,and analyzes factors that affect translator behavior and preferences based on the concepts of “linguistic being” and “social being” as well as the concepts of “intra-translation” and “extra-translation” in the theory.Then,the thesis calculates the frequency of these situations in number,aiming to prove Goldblatt’s translating preference when he translated different types of folklore in a numerical way and grasp the overall trend of the translators’ preference in the “Truth-seeking-Utility-attaining”evaluative model of continuum.Finally,the thesis points out Goldblatt’s overall translating preference and summarizes the factors that affect his preference.The research results show that when translating material folklore,Goldblatt has a moderate-to-high degree of utility-attaining and low-to-moderate degree of truth-seeking;when translating social folklore,his translator behavior is in a high degree of utility-attaining and relatively high degree of truth-seeking;when translating spiritual and linguistic folklore,he has a high degree of utility-attaining,moderate-to-high degree of truth-seeking.In addition,the rationality of translator behavior is partial to ideal.In general,Goldblatt’s degree of utility-attaining is higher than his degree of truth-seeking in these four types of folklore translation,which means he prefers to utility-attaining,according to the “Truthseeking-Utility-attaining” evaluative model of continuum.Various factors affecting such preference are as follows: when Goldblatt is regarded as a linguist being,his translator’s behaviors are affected by Xiao’s writing style,the lack of English equivalents of characteristic folk words,the inconsistency between the actual meaning and the literal meaning of words,religious culture,ghost worship,spiritual belief and superstition culture,appellation with local characteristics and the rhythm of ballads in the process of folk translation.When Goldblatt is regarded as a social being,his translator’s behaviors in intra-translation are mainly affected by the concept of gender equality,the acceptability of target readers,cultural differences,and Goldblatt’s own understanding of religious culture,ghost worship and other spiritual belief cultures.It is undeniable that when he plays other roles besides a translator,factors such as his tutor Liu Wuji,his long journey in Northeast China and the sponsorship of Indiana University Press may also affect his folklore translation.