Dialect Translation From The Perspective Of Creative Treason

With the deepening of Sino-western cultural exchange, superficial knowledge of China can no longer gratify westerners whose interest continuingly bulge on the oriental country.Thanks to the diligent excavation of western scholars and literature lovers, many Chinese writers have greeted the literary world with their unique writing styles. Yan Lianke, one of the litterateurs who has been discovered by western literature world, won the Franz Kafka Prize for his colorful writing of the stories of the bottom and the street-level bureaucracy in China.It is well-known that Yan Lianke is a writer who makes the most of his identity of a Henan native. Since most of his works are composed of unique Henan dialect, the manipulation of the dialectical elements in the translation of his works is worth notice. There are many strategies of translating dialect, yet none of them are capable of serving as the panacea of solving all the issues that related to the translation of dialect. When translating dialect,translators are bound to handle complex situations with different source languages, dialects and target languages involved. Among many strategies that have been employed to deal with such volatile situations, Zhang Guruo's way of translating dialect in his Chinese versions of Thomas Hardy's is the most influential one. When translating the dialectical elements in Hardy's works, Shandong dialect was employed as the Chinese correspondence of the Dorset dialect for the purpose of dynamic equivalence. This controversial strategy of dialect translation has been set as model by some translators and employed in their versions,meanwhile criticized by many other scholars as well. The English version of Yan Lianke's Shou Huo(Lenin's Kisses) is translated by Carlos Rojas. It is praised by many readers and critiques in English world since its publication. Yet instead of translating dialect with another dialect like many other translators did, Carlos Rojas' strategies of translating Shou Huo are rather different. In his English version, many novel expressions are created in orders to implythe existence of the foreign dialect, so as to enlighten the target readers by the strangeness of the language in the version. In this thesis, we are analyzing Carlos Rojas' version of Shou Huo in the perspective of creative treason.Creative treason is a term originated in reception aesthetics. It refers to a kind of objective phenomenon that occurs along with various employment of translation strategies in the process of translation. Seeing from the perspective of reception aesthetic, creative treason describes all the translators' efforts paid to merge the expectation horizon of the source and the target readers. Centered on the translator, either literal translation or adaption, whatever measures taken to merge the expectation horizons of readers in both source and target language can all be considered as loyalty in advanced forms. In this thesis, we analyze selected cases of dialect translation in Lenin's Kisses in the perspective of creative treason in an attempt to shed some light on the nature of dialect translation.