A Study Of The English Translation Of Wolf Totem From The Perspective Of Translation Aesthetics

Literary works play an indispensable role in any country’s efforts to introduceitself to the outside world. To some extent, whether these works can be adequatelytranslated will influence the process of the country’s “going out”. However, literarytranslation is an enormous challenge, even a mission impossible for most translators intheir translation process. Affected by their knowledge scope and cognitivity,translators will take various measures in the process of decoding and reproducing thesource text. Besides, scholars of different schools have established their distinctivetheoretical systems and each system tries every means to defend its rationality.However, the contradictions between the systems confuse or even impose greatdifficulties on translators. Therefore, this thesis, exemplifying Howard Goldblatt’sWolf Totem (English version of Lang Tuteng by Jiang Rong), aims to discuss a possiblesolution to literary translation from the perspective of translation aesthetics.Lang Tuteng written by Jiang Rong, together with its English version Wolf Totemtranslated by Howard Goldblatt, an outstanding scholar and translator forcontemporary Chinese literary in America, published in2004and in2008respectively,has attracted the attention of not only readers, but also of scholars. It is Howard’ssuccessful translation that aids Wolf Totem to win the first Man Asian Literary Prize.For this reason, it is worthwhile to study his translation.In translation process, translation aesthetics renders the following elements as itsresearch targets: aesthetic object (source text and targeted text), aesthetic subject(translator and reader), aesthetic activities, aesthetic judgment, aesthetic appreciation,aesthetic criteria and creative aesthetic representation, etc.Jakobson once stated the three functions of language, one of which is theaesthetic function. As artistic products, literary works undoubtedly bear aestheticvalues. A decent translation must try to represent these values. So, it is reasonable andpractical for translators to integrate translation and aesthetics in their practice andresearch. Based on the theory of Liu Miqing and Mao Ronggui and the researchachievements of other scholars, this thesis will compare the original text and the targettext to substantiate the practicability of translation aesthetics in translating Chinesemodern and contemporary literary works.