A Comparative Study Of Folklore Translation In The Two Chinese Versions Of Spring Moon

The thesis studies the folklore translation in two different versions of Spring Moon, a novel in English written by Chinese American writer Bette Bao Lord, who employed rich folklore expressions to vividly present the panoramic folklore in China’s early20th century. The thesis divides the folklore into three main types, namely verbal folklore, partly verbal folklore and non-verbal folklore according to American folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand’s categorization of folklore. Based on the classification, the thesis translates and interprets the connotations of the typically selected examples from the perspective of functional equivalence, the validity of folklore translation is evaluated by target readers’response to see whether the information which is conveyed stick to the original one in the two different Chinese versions of Spring Moon. Besides, qualitative and quantitative research methods are applied into to this thesis to evaluate which version transfers appropriately to make the target language readers understand the authentic meaning as the source language readers have experienced on folklore translation. Finally, integrating the research results and the author’s comparative analysis, limitations are concluded and some inspirations to the translation of similar literary works with similar culturally loaded elements are given.