On Cultural Filtering In The Translation Of Big Breasts And Wide Hips

The unbalanced situation of China-West cultural exchange has been lasted for a long period,resulting in China’s meager translation and transmission of literary works,and the instability in the quality of translated versions should be counted as one of the major factors.Mo Yan is a root-seeking writer of our time,sporting an intense local flavor in one of his masterpieces,Big Breasts&Wide Hips,which highlights the artistic charm and is a challenge for translators as well.Howard Goldblatt,who is honored as "Chief Translator of China’s Modern and Contemporary Literature",manifests his delicate handling of cultural information in the aforesaid work,which can serve as a reference for C-E translation of China’s literary outputs.Cultural filtering is an indispensible part in literary translation,and is a reflection of translator’s subjectivity,selectivity and creativity.Literary works containing China’s cultural features will probably not be accepted by foreign readers and end up in an unsuccessful cultural exchange unless they have undergone translators’ elaborate cultural filtering.Therefore,this thesis has probed into the cultural filtering in Big Breasts and Wide Hips translated by Howard Goldblatt,mainly discussing two topics,that is why the translation of Big Breasts and Wide Hips should undergo cultural filtering and how to carry it through.The study has found that Howard Goldblatt has conducted cultural filtering through four outlets under the guidance of readers’ response.The first is transliteration plus annotation,which keeps the exotic flavor.The second is cultural substitution,which produces an acquainted cultural experience by the replacement of unfamiliar objects.The third is paraphrase,which abandons the language framework and seeks after the essence.The last is omission,which leaves out the redundant information to generate a smooth version.All of these are unique features of Howard Goldblatt’s cultural filtering,and at the same time are effective tools to produce a readable and excellent translation,and thus are worth of learning by other translators.