A Study Of The English Version Of Lang Tu Teng From The Perspective Of The Rewriting Theory

Lang Tu Teng is a semi-autobiological novel written by Jiang Rong. Since its publication, the sale has amounted to five million copies. In 2007, the author won the Man Asian Literary Prize. In 2008, the English version Wolf Totem immediately rose to fame after its publication. It was translated by Howard Goldblatt and published by the Penguin Press. Quite a few scholars have done researches on the English version of this novel from the perspective of the skopos theory or translator’s subjectivity. This thesis will approach Wolf Totem from the perspective of the rewriting theory, discussing the influences of ideology, poetics and patronage on Goldblatt’s translation and making an attempt to introduce Chinese literature abroad while fighting against the cultural imperialism.Since the 1970s, the cultural turn has appeared in translation studies. The scholars---James S Holmes, Andre Lefevere and Susan Bassnett, shifted their attention to the result, function and system of translation. Lefevere holds that the translator is entitled to rewrite the original text for certain purposes. He points out that translation as the rewriting of original text cannot completely reflect the original text under the control of ideology, poetics and patronage.As a novel translator, Goldblatt intends to be faithful to the original. Regarding readers’ reading habits as the most important task in translation, he negotiates between the exotic flavor of the source text and the fluency and coherence of the target text. The translator has omitted nearly 50,000 words in translating Lang Tu Teng under the influences of ideology, poetics and patronage. Based on the rewriting theory, this thesis, on the one hand, analyzes the influences of ideology, poetics and patronage on the selection of Lang Tu Teng and on Goldblatt’s translation of Lang Tu Teng; on the other hand, it makes a systematic analysis of the translation using examples from the source and target texts. Finally, it also discusses the cultural imperialism in the target text and the ways to reduce the adverse effect of cultural imperialism.This thesis consists of seven chapters. Chapter One introduces the background, the purpose and significance and the structure of the research. Chapter Two introduces Lang Tu Teng and Wolf Totem and presents a literature review. Chapter Three reviews Lefevere’s rewriting theory and its three constraints:ideology, poetics and patronage. Chapter Four discusses the reasons Goldblatt has chosen Lang Tu Teng for translation from the perspective of the three constraints, i.e. ideology, poetics and patronage. Chapter Five analyzes the three methods Goldblatt used in translating LangTu Teng, i.e. omission, addition and adaptation. Chapter Six analyses Howard Goldblatt’s translational rewriting from the cultural imperialism perspective. Chapter Seven is the conclusion.