A Study Of Goldblatt’s Translation Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out From The Perspective Of Transitivity Theory

In 2012,Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature for a series of works.He thus becomes the first native Chinese writer from China to win this award.Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is his masterpiece which has been enjoying great popularity among western readers for its unique color of “hallucinatory realism”.Goldblatt’s success in translating this novel provides new reflections and references for the cross-cultural translation studies of Chinese literature.As a result,a large number of Chinese scholars in the area of translation studies have been paying close attention to this American sinologist and his translated works.Systemic functional linguistics has been applied in translation studies since 1960 s.Halliday(2000)proposes that the three metafunctions of language are ideational,interpersonal and textual functions which simultaneously function in communication.The ideational function reflects the content of external and internal world and expresses the basic message of language.Successful transferring of the ideational function is the key to the translation,which will lay an essential foundation for translating interpersonal and textual functions.Transitivity system,a semantic system and the realization form of the ideational function,includes material,mental,relational,verbal,behavioral and existential processes.All languages can be analyzed and generalized in above six processes.In translation,translators can fully interpret the original text through the division of functional components and then transfer the ideational function accurately.Previous translation studies on transitivity are mainly in the poetic field.This thesis takes the transitivity theory as an analytical device to conduct a contrastive analysis of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and its English translation,revealing the importance of transitivity to fictional translation,that is,it is an important theory guiding the success of literary translation.Its guiding functions are reflected in two aspects.On the one hand,the translator preserves transitivity processes of the original to the largest extent in the target,creating an ideational equivalence in form and content.On the other hand,when facing linguistic and cultural differences,the translator conducts some necessary transitivity shifts under the guidance of the transitivity theory.Goldblatt keeps a balance between the orientation of the source and target languages,and reaches an ideal level of translation effect.The present study makes new discoveries in theoretical and practical aspects.At the same time,it proves that the faithfulness of translation cannot be determined simply according to the quantity and distribution of transitivity processes.The thesis enriches studies on Goldblatt’s translation Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out in the field of systemic functional linguistics.