A Study On Howard Goldblatts’ Three Sisters From The Perspective Of Eco-translatology

The novel Yumi by Bi Feiyu won the Third Lu Xun Literary Prize, and its English translation Three Sisters awarded the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize. The source novel and the translated version have aroused attention in both the literary fields. Howard Goldblatt is the chief translator of Chinese culture. There are only six published research theses on the Goldblatts’ translation of Bi Feiyu’s Yumi, which explore the translated version in terms of the conversational implicature of pragmatic; the narrative perspective of "the second" person; the translation strategy of foreignization and the translator centeredness. Professor Hu Gengshen puts forward the theory of eco-translatology, which provides a brand new perspective for translation studies.Based on the theory of eco-tanslatology, this thesis sets out to study Three Sisters translated by Howard Glodblatts and interpret the eco-translatology. The author combines Goldblatts’ Three Sisters with the theory of eco-translatology, considering that the translator needs to make the translated version adapt to the eco-translatology environment by taking culture, society and other factors into consideration. The author explores the translators’ adaptation and selection from the perspective of needs, competence and multi-dimensional transformations in the pre-translating process and the translating process. This thesis analyzes the translation activity of the translators from linguistic dimension, cultural dimension and communicative dimension. Specifically, the analysis of linguistic dimension is from the lexical, syntactic and textual level; the analysis of cultural dimension is from Chinese idioms, kinship address, cultural-loaded phrases and social customs; the analysis of communicative dimension is from higher and lower degree of holistic adaptation and selection. This thesis explores the significance of Three Sisters from reader’s feedback, translator quality and the degree of multi-dimensional transformation according to the evaluation criteria of eco-translatology, which improves the identity of source novel and promotes the cultural transmission.This thesis gives a comparatively overall description of Goldblatts’ translating process of Yumi. It aims to get a clearer understanding of the translator’s centeredness and dominance in the process of translation, and then testify the feasibility of the interpretation of eco-translatology and reference significance which the successful experience of translating Yumi offers to the future translation practice.