On Creativity In Chinese Folklore Translation

Folklore culture is a series of material or mental cultural phenomena in the daily life of ordinary people.As an important component of culture,folklore involves every aspect of people's life:food,clothing,housing and travel;weddings and funerals;festivals;religion and beliefs;etc.Chinese folklore has a long history,with the improvement of our international status and the enhancement of China's comprehensive power,the "out-going" of Chinese culture has become more and more urgent.Tales of Huan River is a literature work with a strong folklore flavor which reflects folk customs in the northeast China and there are a great number of descriptions concerning with folklore.Meanwhile,Tales of Hulan River is the most representative works of Hsiao Hung,which has been described by Mao Dun as "a narrative poem,a colorful landscape painting,and a string of mournful ballads".Goldblatt is one of the most famous researchers of Hsiao Hung who is awarded the prize of Hsiao Hung research and is famous for Biography of Hsiao Hung and New Biography of Hsiao Hung.His translation works,Tales of Hulan River,takes"readers' acceptance" and "readability" as standards.With the guidance of these standards,he translates the folk customs in the original text creatively and has a relatively good effect of translation and introduction.Tales of Hulan River translated by Goldblatt embodies his translation thoughts:translation is betrayal,translation is rewriting and translation is the cross-culture communication.These translation thoughts happen to have the same views with the core idea of medio-translatology—"creative treason".From the perspective of medio-translatology,this paper,which combines the qualitative and case study methods,studies and analyzes the translation strategies in Goldblatt's the Tales of Hulan River translated.Chapter one gives a brief introduction of research background,research purpose,research significance and the structure of the thesis.Chapter two is the literature review that introduces the study objects such as Hsiao Hung,Goldblatt,Tales of Hulan River and its English version.Besides,it makes a review of the history of folklore translation and presents problems that exist in the former translation practice.Finally,this chapter introduces the medio-translatology and its value.Chapter three to chapter five are the main parts and also the innovations of the thesis,which makes an in-depth and systematic analysis of the Tales of Hulan River translated by Goldblatt from three aspects:"creative fidelity","creative treason" and "creative compromise".These three chapters also point out lots of descriptions of folklore in Tales of Hulan River.Goldblatt adopts "creative"translation method to interpret the different cultures and eventually achieves the aim to propagate the cultural essence among different cultures faithfully through such type of unique translation strategy.Chapter six is the conclusion which mainly presents and concludes the discoveries and viewpoints of this paper,briefly states the limitations of the research and proposes several suggestions for the follow-up studies.