A Study Of The English Rewriting Of The Garlic Ballads

The “going-out” of Chinese literature still has a long way to go. Translation is the only way to achieve this goal. Since high quality translation assures the success of the “going-out” of Chinese literature, translation study becomes necessary and important in China. The Cultural Turn in translation studies pushes forward the study of rewriting. As the study of rewriting develops, agents of translation gradually become noted by researchers. Translation is usually affected by some agents. Agents of translation select works for translation, appoint translators, exert certain criteria on translation and so forth. In a word, agents could be involved in the whole translation process.From the perspective of agents of translation, this thesis firstly discusses various agents that had disseminated and translated Chinese literature in the US in the 19 th and20th centuries. These agents had made Chinese literature a field of academic studies in the US, had attracted numerous American students and scholars to study Chinese literature and had expanded the influence of Chinese literature in the US society.What Howard Goldblatt has achieved in spreading Chinese literature in the US is dependent on those agents. In the publication of translation works, different agents of translation have different translation modes. There are four translation modes for Chinese literature in the US, some of the translations are for academic use and others aim at making profits. The previous sales of Chinese literature show that rewritten works by American translators sell better.The focus of this thesis lies in studying how agents influenced the rewriting of The Garlic Ballads. The result shows that the rewriting of this novel was influenced by three major agents: Viking Press, the translation initiator Howard Goldblatt and Goldblatt's translation mentors Arthur Waley and the Yangs. Most of the rewriting parts were done by Viking Press. Since Viking Press funded the publication of The Garlic Ballads, it had every right to change the translation. Under its influence, some of the ideological contents were rewritten or deleted, the ending of this novel was rewritten, and the whole translation is more readable than the original text. The translation initiator Howard Goldblatt was also an important agent in the translationprocess. He rewrote some contents in the aspects of poetics and universe of discourse.Specifically, he shaped a prototypical character, removed some literary devices, and rewrote some concepts, persons and objects. Howard Goldblatt's translation mentors Arthur Waley and the Yangs had influenced Goldblatt's cultural and linguistic policies,their influences could be traced in The Garlic Ballads. Arthur Waley advocates the recreation of the gist, tone and spirit of the original text, and some of the rewritten parts and added parts in The Garlic Ballads were done to translate the tone and spirit of the original text. The Yangs influenced the translation with their “preserving the Chinese images” criterion. Besides the above agents, Mo Yan, Joseph Lau and Xiaobing Tang also had participated or influenced the translation.As a whole, most of the agents in the translation of The Garlic Ballads exerted changes in the translation to make this novel met with the US dominant ideology,poetics and universe of discourse in the late 20 th century.