On Creative Treason In The Translation Of The Novel Gaoxing From The Perspective Of Rewriting Theory

The novel Gaoxing,one of the representative works of the contemporary Chinese writer Jia Pingwa,was translated into English by the British translator Nicky Harman and published in 2017.To date,its English rendition Happy Dreams has been well received on American mainstream websites like Amazon and Goodreads.A careful comparison of the original and the English version reveals that unlike some scholartranslators who translated with a high degree of allegiance to the source text,Harman conducts creative treason in various aspects,which the traditional translation approach finds it hard to account for.Since the cultural turn of translation studies,the rewriting theory proposed by André Lefevere has adopted a descriptive approach to analyze translation from a social and cultural perspective,greatly expanding the field of translation studies.On the basis of this theory,this thesis conducts a descriptive research on the creative treason in Happy Dreams under the influence of patronage,poetics and ideology and how creative treason affects the portrayal of character,reproduction of style,authentication of background and cultural transmission in Happy Dreams.Through a comparative analysis of the source text and target text,this thesis summarizes its findings as follows.Firstly,the shift of patronage has caused the standardization of dialects and the explicitation of profanities and taboos.Secondly,difference in poetics has resulted in the change of narrative point of view,obliteration of the phonetic representation of dialectal sounds,and explicitation of the voice of characters.Thirdly,divergence in ideology has led to creative treason in the translation of political,religious and ethical connotation.The effects of creative treason are mainly reflected in four dimensions.Firstly,the explicitation of voice of characters has transformed plain narration into the utterance of characters,contributing to the creation of a more vivid and striking image.Secondly,the obliteration of the internal deviation in narrative point of view results in the variation of style.Thirdly,the omission of dialectal sounds has reduced the local color,making the background of the novel less authentic.Fourthly,the rewriting of political,religious,and ethical connotation helps to smooth out possible culture bumps and facilitated the transmission of the text.