A Study Of The English Version Of Frog From The Perspective Of Rewriting Theory

Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009,and in 2011 he published the novel Frog,for which he was awarded Mao Dun Literature Award in 2012.Howard Goldblatt's English version was published in 2013.The novel tells the story of Mo Yan's aunt as a rural female doctor who witnesses the implementation of birth control policy in China.The novel reflects,in the struggle against family planning,the human pursuit of his instinct of breeding.The promotion of Frog in the English world could not have been so successful without Howard Goldblatt's translation.This paper applies the rewriting theory of Andre Lefevere to the analysis of rewriting techniques adopted by the sinologist Howard Goldblatt in Frog's English version.Andre Lefevere proposed rewriting theory in the period of cultural turn in translation studies.He believes that the nature of translation is rewriting.The translator is mainly manipulated by three factors in the process of rewriting--ideology,poetics and patronage.Ideology mainly refers to the political,religious and social-cultural aspects of a country;poetics mainly refers to the manipulation of literary techniques in its national literary system,including genres,symbols,themes,character names,idioms and sentence patterns.The patronage factor refers to the translation request that the publisher or authority gives to the translator.These three factors are interdependent and interactional.Based on a comparative analysis of the parallel texts of Frog,the paper delves into Howard Goldblatt's rewriting techniques from the perspectives of ideology and poetics.It is shown that Howard Goldblatt often adopts adaptation and abridgment in political,religious and socio-cultural ideological rewriting;he often employs transliteration,adaptation,reversion and synthesization in poetic rewriting of character names,idioms,proverbs and sentence patterns.The study of the rewriting techniques of Howard Goldblatt reveals that rewriting can enhance the acceptance of the target language readers at the cost of some of the essence of the original text.All in all,the localization principle and the acceptability of target language readers are the rationale of rewriting.This paper consists of four chapters.The first chapter is the literature review,expounding the research status of the rewriting theory and the English translation of Frog at home and abroad.The second chapter is the theoretical foundation,which discusses the formation of the rewriting theory and its three control factors.The third chapter and the fourth chapter analyze Howard Goldblatt's rewriting techniques from the perspectives of ideology and poetics.Due to the lack of materials,what is not explored in this paper is the patronage factor that affects rewriting,and it is left to subsequent efforts in the future.