On The Medio-translation And Transmission Of Howard Goldblatt’s Version Of Red Sorghum

The overseas transmission of Chinese literature is very helpful to build China‘s positive image, to improve China‘s cultural soft power and to enhance China‘s overall national strength. Chinese literature, as a whole, however, is not in the central position now, but in the marginal and disadvantaged position of the world literature. Therefore, it will take a long time to transmit more successfully Chinese literature to foreign countries.In 2012, Mo Yan, the representative writer of Chinese literature, obtained the Nobel Prize. This fact makes Chinese literature well known in the world, and causes the successful translation and transmission of Chinese literature to be the hot topic and focus in foreign and domestic academia. Based on the theories of translation poetics and medio-translatology, in order to encourage more and more Chinese works to be accepted in foreign countries, this paper makes a detailed study of the English version of Mo Yan‘s Red Sorghum translated by Howard Goldblatt, and expounds its typical model of medio-translation and transmission of Chinese works.Translation is the bottleneck for Chinese literature to go to the outside world. Howard Goldblatt, the leading translator of modern Chinese literature, exerts actively his subjectivity in the course of translating Red Sorghum. Especially, Howard Goldblatt shows his own translation poetics as well as the major American social poetics in the choice of text, translation techniques and poetics rewriting. As we all know, the completion of translation is not the end of transmission, but the beginning of cultural transmission and cross-cultural communication. In addition to its high-level translation, Red Sorghum has been successfully transmitted to the West with the help of western major publishing presses, academies and mass media. Then, it has become the Chinese works which is translated into the most foreign languages and which is republished most frequently. Consequently, it attracts more and more western readers and has been the focus in the western academy. In terms of the medio-translation subject model, text choice and transmitting channels, it offers a feasible model for Chinese literature to be translated and to go to foreign countries successfully and make an equal talk with the world literature.This paper consists of seven parts. The introduction part discusses the research background and the research significance, and analyses the related domestic research achievements. The first chapter deals with the artistic features of the original text Red Sorghum, and the outcome of its English version by Howard Goldblatt, a great lover of Chinese literature and Chinese culture. The second chapter talks about the origin and research of western and China‘s translation poetics, and Howard Goldblatt‘s individual poetics application in the practice of translating Red Sorghum. The third chapter tells the successful transmission of Red Sorghum in the West from the perspective of the operation of western major publishing press, the active push of academies and mass media and the effective literature agency. The fourth chapter studies the response of western academies and western common readers. The fifth chapter expounds the feasible translation and transmission model of Chinese literature in terms of the translator‘s identity, translation contents, transmission channels and the writer‘s cross-cultural consciousness. The conclusion part points out the inadequacy of the paper and makes a prospect of future study of different stages of Chinese cultural transmission to the world.