A Narratological Study On The English Version Of The Garlic Ballads

Novel is a kind of representative narrative literature, whose style can be presented by various narrative schema and narrative techniques. Therefore, in process of interpreting and translating a novel, translator should not only grasp the linguistic differences between the source text and the target text but have a better understanding of the narrative features of the source text, and seize the narrative intention of the original author through narrative pattern. The Garlic Ballads, one of the representative works of Mo Yan, was published in 1988. It is excerpted by the official website of Nobel Prize as an introduction to Mo Yan’s works. Selecting the English version of The Garlic Ballads as object of study, the author of this thesis from the perspective of narratology attempts to make a comparative analysis on The Garlic Ballads and its translation from such three aspects as polyphonic narrative, narrative grammar and speech presentation, which aims at testifying the explanatory power of narratology on the criticism of fictional translation. The study finds that the translator in the process of translation has altered the narrative schema and discourse through adjusting polyphonic narrative, rearranging the event sequence according to the space-time relationship, omitting the satellites, and transforming the speech presentation. In view of this, the reading difficulty of the translation is lowered and the English version is more easily accepted and understood by target readers from different levels. However, the literary meaning and aesthetic value are discounted to some extent. Through the narrative analysis on the English version of The Garlic Ballads, it is hoped that this thesis can deepen the understanding of readers on the English version of The Garlic Ballads and help us learn the translation strategies of the translator on one hand, and further providing some insight into translation study and international publicity of Chinese modern and contemporary literary works on the other hand.