A Research On Image Construction Through Translation-with The English Translation Of Happy Dreams And Its Paratexts As A Case Study

Gaoxing,a contemporary Chinese novel written by Jia Pingwa,tells a story that two countrymen,Happy and Wufu,migrate to the city of Xi’an in the hope of pursuing a better life but finally end up supporting themselves by collecting trash and live in the old and shabby slum.The novel contains a great amount of dialogues involving the local culture and the custom of Shaanxi.Since the English version Happy Dreams translated by Nicky Harman was published in 2017,it has drawn significant attention from foreign media and readers.The process /literary translation can be regarded as a process of introducing the images of the original culture to the target readers.In this sense,the translated text can be the representative of the original text to the target culture.Through reading the translated text,the target readers can first have their own understanding of the author,the book and then form their cognition about the images of the source literature,source culture and source cultural society.During this process,it is easy for those who are first acquainted with the source culture to establish their first impression towards the source literature,source culture and society of source cultural context mentioned above.Therefore,the translation and spread of Happy Dreams in foreign countries,especially in the U.S.,can be regarded as the process of constructing the images of the author,the book as well as the Chinese nation.Based on the theories of Medio-translatology,Imagology theory and Paratext theory of Gerard Genette,the thesis adopts the descriptive and quantitative approach to first figure out the reception effect of Happy Dreams among foreign readers by collecting information from foreign websites and media platforms including Goodreads,Amazon,WorldCat and so on.And then the collation of the translation strategies adopted by the translator and analysis on different reviews with the help of BFSU PowerConc software are necessary to furtherly analyze how the translated text and its paratexts help to forge the images of the author,the book,and even the Chinese nation to the English world.There is no denying that literary translation can play a crucial role in constructing the images.Besides the translated text,the paratext,including the preface,the translator’s acknowledgements and the reviews from authoritative journals and media,can also be of great significance for constructing the images of the author,the book,and even the Chinese nation,which is worth noting for scholars while conducting translation studies.