A Study Of Howard Goldblatt’s Translation Strategies In Red Sorghum From The Perspective Of Seed Transplanting Theory

As a significant part of China’s "Going Global" strategy, international communication of Chinese culture has been gradually enhanced in the process of globalization. However, through the ages, export of China’s translated works cannot match the extensiveness and profoundness of Chinese culture yet, and a large number of translated works are still confined to classical literature and poetry despite a handful of outstanding modern and contemporary literary works. In recent years, such situation, to some extent, has been improved and the overseas market has published an increasing number of best-selling Chinese translated books, including many novels by Mo Yan, owing to not only the achievements of modern Chinese writers but also those translators who have studied Chinese and foreign cultures and built the bridge for "Going Global" of Chinese culture.The 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature endowed Mo Yan with international fame and also granted Howard Goldblatt, an American Sinologist, great success. This thesis has selected his English version of Red Sorghum as the object for qualitative study. By comparison, exemplification as well as other methods, the author has found out that translation strategies of Goldblatt coincide with the theory of "seed transplanting theory" proposed for poetry translation by Susan Bassnett, a leading scholar of the "cultural turn" in translation studies, thus this thesis made an attempt to apply "seed transplanting" theory to translation research of this novel. As emphasized by Susan Bassnett, the key of translation is to transplant the "seed" of original works into the soil of target language before they take root and sprout. These "seeds" hereof refer to the elements, the content or form, that endow the original works with vitality. After detecting the "seeds" in the original text, translators transplant them by means of "reserving" or "mutating" so as to guarantee readability, acceptability and playfulness of translation.In this thesis, systematic and in-depth analysis has been conducted from perspectives of language and narration. As for language, as representative of root-seeking literature, this novel contains a lot of dialects and culture-loaded words. In addition, Mo Yan has employed foregrounding language, and unconventional collocations of color words and modifiers, to enhance the manic mood of the novel. In terms of these "language seeds" in the original works, the translator adopted diverse transplanting ways, like literal translation, retaining the original images, coining new words, using English idioms, paraphrasing, etc. When it comes to narrative respect, Mo Yan has repeatedly applied "flashbacks" and "plots jumping" to magic realism of the works, and "omniscient multi-perspective narrator" for novel writing has also become one of the two "narration seeds" successfully transplanted by Goldblatt in the process of translation. Between the lines of the whole translated novel are "vitality", "readability" and "joyfulness" stressed by Susan Bassnett, rendering a successful model of "seed transplantation"The thesis has analyzed and summarized transplanting methods used by Howard Goldblatt for different cases with the aim of providing reference for translators in translation techniques. Meanwhile, this attempt to apply "seed transplanting theory" to novel translation research can broaden translation research perspective and further contribute to the prosperity of Chinese translated works.