A Study Of Howard Goldblatt’s English Translation Of Wolf Totem From The Perspective Of Translation Ethics

Translation as the bridge of cross-cultural communication is related to complicated human relationships and cultures, so it needs the guidance of translation ethics. Among so many translation researchers, Chesterman and his proposal of five models exert deep influence in academic circle, and he offers concrete, operational ethical models for translation study, namely, the ethics of representation, the ethics of service, the ethics of communication, the norm-based ethics and the ethics of commitment. From these five ethical dimensions he proposes different requirements for the translation and translator. Lang Tu Teng is an excellent novel of contemporary Chinese literature, which contains abundant Mongolian culture. Its English version has been studied from manipulation theory, Skopos and so on, but it has been rarely studied from the perspective of translation ethics. Most previous studies focused on explaining the deletions of the translation and didn’t study it as a whole. The present thesis aims to make a study of Wolf Totem from the perspective of translation ethics, which provides a new perspective for the existing researches.In the light of Chesterman’s five models, the present thesis is going to analyze Goldblatt’s Wolf Totem to study ethical models of translation that Goldblatt has obeyed, strategies and methods that he has adopted so as to improve the understanding of translation activities and promote the cross-cultural understanding and communication. It is found that Chesterman’s five models are all embodied in Wolf Totem. For those phrases and sentences that are full of Mongolian culture, Goldblatt mainly adopts literal translation to keep exotic culture, which represents the source text and the author’s intention of the original text. In order to obey the instructions of the editor, he has to delete some contents of the source text, which violates the ethics of representation to some degree. Considering the reading habits, curiosities and difficulties of the target readers, the translator adds some contents to help them understand and deletes some idioms which need lots of words to explain. He mostly translates Chinese idioms and phrases literally in the condition of being understood, which satisfies the curiosities of the target reader. As a professional translator, Goldblatt spares no efforts to translate Lang Tu Teng, obeys professional ethics and strives to improve his translation skills. Because of the overlaps and conflicts among the five models, Goldblatt has his own choice and cooperation, which makes the translation readable and realizes the cross-cultural communication.