A Study Of Foregrounding Language Translation In The Garlic Ballads Based On The Figure-ground Theory

Mo Yan is the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature,so his works have been considered as important windows through which westerners can get a glimpse of China.One of his writing characteristics is local color,which is credited to the use of foregrounding language to a certain degree.The Garlic Ballads is the second long novel written by Mo Yan and its English version is completed by Howard Goldblatt,with the prominent foregrounding characteristic,the novel is chosen for further discussion.Based on a true event,the novel tells a story happened between the local government and garlic farmers,which pays great attention to the survival condition of poor people in the bottom of society.With the great imagination and mastery of language,Mo Yan presents a great deal of foregrounding language.Foregrounding originated from western painting.In order to convey the main spiritual connotation of paintings,the painter distinguishes key element in a painting work from other objects,so as to achieve the desired artistic effect.In this process,the key element is foregrounded for highlighting,and other objects fade into the background.Later on,this method is employed in literary creation by linguists to obtain a certain aesthetic effect or prominence.As an important theory in cognitive linguistics,figure-ground is established on the prominence principle.Figure is regarded as the focus of attention and the more prominent part in our cognition,whereas ground is the cognitive reference as well as the less prominent part.It can be seen that the figure-ground theory is homogeneous with foregrounding,since both of them intend to make one thing stand out and the others fade out.This thesis is a descriptive study based on qualitative approach,contrastive textual analysis and induction.Firstly,it takes the “quantitative foregrounding” and “qualitative foregrounding” put forward by Leech as the basis for classification,and the foregrounding language in source text of The Garlic Ballads is marked out through intensive reading.Then,relevant analysis was made to compare the correspondence degree in foregrounding language between the source and target texts.Finally,discussions are made under the guidance of figure-ground theory to interpret the cognitive causes that influence translator’s choice in figure/ground shift.Based on the detailed statistics,it is found that the foregrounding language in The Garlic Ballads falls into lexical deviation,semantic deviation,dialectal deviation,deviation of register,deviation of historical period,phonological deviation,repetition and parallelism.Goldblatt has adopted different methods in translating the foregrounding language,which are mainly literal translation,liberal translation,and omission.On this basis,three types of corresponding relations between the source and target texts are formed,that is,fully transferring the foregrounding effect,partially transferring the foregrounding effect and omission.Most translations transfer the foregrounding effect,amounting to 83%.The statistical results coincide with Howard Goldblatt’s principle of faithful translation as he said in The Writing Life.With the guidance of the figure-ground theory,the thesis finds out some differences in the cognitive construal between Mo Yan and Goldblatt,which reflects translator’s different degrees in prominence as dealing with all kinds of deviations,and it also illustrates the fundamental reason why the translator is not completely faithful to the source text.