A Translation Report On Village Soul Guided By The Translator Behavior Criticism

The author of Village Soul is Qiao Dianyun,one representative writer of the "Nanyang City Writers Group".His works pursue the realism,and dare to criticize and reveal the root of the bad habits of the nation.Later,he is called "half a farmer philosopher and half a farmer psychologist".Village Soul was published by People’s Literature Publishing House in 1984 on Selected Short Stories.It describes a highly qualified Communist Party member Zhang Laoqi meticulously executed every instruction of superiors,depicting that he would rather be coaxed than coax others.And several plots like falling on the muddy road,smashing stones.handing in grains and gravels check are interweaved together to highlight the conflicts.This novel describes his unique living condition and the tragic fate,then puts forward alarming social problemsThis novel as the folk literature in nature,features its rustic and plain folk language,including many idioms and culture-loaded idioms of material,animal and society.Under the guidance of Translator Behavior Criticism,the translator applies "role shifting of translator’ and"Truth-seeking and Utility-attaining" to analyze both the literal meaning and "folk flavor",that is,the characteristics of folk language in English translation.In addition,the translator as one member of Professor Zhou Lingshun folk language study team has sorted out ten novels of Mo Yan translated by Howard Goldblatt to construct a Chinese-English bilingual corpus of folk language,analyzing and concluding his translation strategies and utility frequency targeting separately idioms and culture-loaded idioms as the reference for the translator’s following translation activity.The significance of this translation report lies in that with the case analysis of folk language in the novel and with the guidance of sinologist Howard Goldblatt’s successful translation practice,the translator expects to make some contribution worthy of reference for folk literature English translation,especially from the perspective of idioms and culture-loaded idioms,and some conclusions are as follow:literal translation is prior to be chosen when there are no elusive expressions with Chinese characteristics in original text,but free translation will be adopted to deal with special culture expressions or figures of speech like puns and rhyme.As for the repetitive expressions,both omission and annotation will be chosen to cut off the redundant information then selectively add the explanatory expression as semantic supplement As to the culture-loaded idioms,literal and annotated translation are more frequently to be adopted to reserve or replace the loaded objects in order to embody the cultural features,but if there are too many loaded objects in one expression or culture-loaded idioms of society,free translation will be selected to avoid the wordy expressions and coherence will be achievedIn view of this translation practice is from Chinese to English,the translator has invited American professor Alex to proofread the whole translation text to improve the accuracy of wordings and expressions so as to be accepted by target readers.