A Study On Howard Goldblatt’s English Translation Of Feng Ru Fei Tun From The Perspective Of Social Constructivism

Feng Ru Fei Tun is a novel highly recommended by Mo Yan.Since its English version was firstly published by New Arcade Press in 2004,it has got widespread attention from Washington Post,San Francisco Chronicle and other mainstream journals in America and western world.A study on Howard Goldblatt and his English translation is of great significance for us to better analyze the image construction of Chinese culture going abroad and the role of translation in shaping cultural and social images.Recently,with the rise of the “cultural turn” of translation studies,translation scholars have begun to study translation from the perspective of sociology,and social constructivist theory belongs to this category.Social constructivism emphasizes that social and cultural mechanisms influence personal experience,and thus influence the translator’s experience in the field of translation,text selection,translation presentation and translation strategies.It also emphasizes the impact of cultural intermediation and social resources.As a cultural intermediary,the translator’s life experience,translation purpose,and subjectivity will affect the translation result.This paper discusses the influence of social and cultural mechanisms on translators and reconstruction and change on the female images in the novel by the translator from the perspective of social constructivism.The author adopts the methods of textual and comparative analysis to explore the influence of social and cultural factors on the translator,and analyzes the changes between the female images in the original text and those in the translation caused by this influence.It is argued in this paper that social constructivism has an impact on the translator Howard Goldblatt’s choice of original text,use of translation methods,and the presentation or output of translations.Women in Big Breasts,Wide Hips are created by social constructivist factors.Some female images have been transformed during the translation process.To be specific,Goldblatt’s personal experience led him to cater to American and even Western readers’ interests on sex and politics-related woks under the backdrop of American or western context,and his personal resonance with the theme of the war made him choose to translate works with strong rendering power and expressive and dramatic language,including Big Breasts and Wide Hips.He used translation as a means of constructing language and creating Chinese imagespsychologically in the West,especially the images of Chinese women.He created this image to cater to the interests and reading habits of American and Western readers at the time,and reconstructed images of Chinese women that meet the expectations of Western culture.In order to achieve this purpose,he used various methods such as adaptation of chronological order,deletion and addition,which causes the transformation of original female images.The weak mother and Shangguan family daughters became more powerful.The supposedly traditional mothers and women like Geng Lianlian became more modern.The third sister’s crazy and insane image in the source text became a more rational image highlighted in the ambience of tragic times.These transformations are Goldblatt’s reconstruction under the influence of social and cultural mechanisms to achieve his translation purpose.This paper is an attempt to study the change of images in the process of translation from the perspective of social constructivism,which will help us better understand the important role of translation in shaping cultural and social aspects.