Co-translation Model In Globalized Chinese Literary Translation

In the present beckoning age of globalization and cultural diversity, each government in the world attaches great importance to global communication and international promotion so as to improve their cultural competitiveness. Jameson (1998) meticulously observes that the practice of globalization in culture is nothing but a sort of cultural import and export. Hence China has "cultural going out" strategy to make the rest of world know Chinese culture better. Translation, especially literary translation has been playing a significant role in accelerating the process of cultural globalization. As a means of heterogeneous cultural interpretation and transmission, literary translation has already been an important carrier of Chinese "cultural going out" and vital channel of improving Chinese cultural soft power and plural cultural communication. While severely affected and restricted by ideology and patron, Chinese literary translation works were not accepted well outside China. The loss of translation position and the master translator Yang Xianyi sparked heated discussion with focus on how to better promote Chinese literature and culture to the world. Several scholars such as Xie Tianzhen, Hu Dexiang and others rightly point out that the translation of state institutes is not only literary or literal translation, but the cross-cultural translation which should consider the transmission and reception of translation in the different cultural context. Therefore, in the process of literary translation, the coherence point between cultural reception of target language and "going out" needs to be further explored.Li thinks literary translation needs the right guidance of GOC and the cooperation of Chinese and foreign parties meanwhile strengthen copyrights protection and translation talent development (李洁2013). Shi and Lv hold that "Co-translation is an optimum proposal to actualize the needs of Chinese publications walking close to western readers"(史凯,吕竞男2013). However, co-translation has received little attention. There has no comprehensive and systematic study of this important and historical translation method yet. In light of this, the issue addressed here, both in theory and in practice, is how to make co-translation model serve well in Chinese literary translation from the context of globalization and solve the contradiction between Chinese cultural transmission and reception of the target language readers. Firstly, the research background, core questions&methodology, research significance and the structure of this thesis are introduced; then previous research at home and abroad on this subject is combed and Lefebvre’s translation theory is introduced in the second chapter. After that, with the guidance of Lefebvre’s theory, an optimal co-translation which considering the present context and according to the contrastive analysis of advantages and disadvantages of the existed models is constructed. At last, the application of this model in different translation activities is analyzed. The conclusion shows that the improvised model is a better solution to current translation predicament. By literature research and with the guidance of theory, the author gives a more general definition of "Co-translation" and "globalized literary translation". The author also proposes a solution after discussing the problems and causes of Chinese "cultural going out". The exploration of "Co-translation Model" in this paper is a beneficial attempt which hopes to find the way to balance "going out" and "being accepted", so as to explore the way out for Chinese literary translation. Thereby Chinese literary translation can better serve for the construction of the global cultural diversity and safeguarding of national cultural identity.