A Study Of The Correlation Between The Text Omission In The Three Chinese Translations Of The Good Earth And Cultural Markedness

The Good Earth is a novel about Chinese peasants created by Pearl Sydenstricker Buck,an American author who grew up in China.It was published in the United States in 1931 and was widely welcomed by the American people during the Great Depression.Moreover,it has won many international awards,such as Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938.The book’s description of China restores a rather real old China for foreign people.In the 1930 s,this book was widely known to the Chinese people through translation.In just 10 years,there were at least 6 translations,and 3 of them all have different amounts of omission.In order to explore the deep cultural logic behind the omission,this thesis made a comparative and descriptive study of three translations of The Good Earth by Zhang Wanli & Zhang Tiesheng,Hu Zhongzhi and You Zhiwu,and based on event model from semiotics,which includes original event,conscious event and text event,the original text was classified as the text event and the omitted texts were classified into the original event and the conscious event.After classification,from the perspective of cultural markedness,which contains three elements of the normal,the neutral and the alien,the omitted texts were further analyzed,and the correlation between the omission in the text and cultural markedness was explored.Combined with all the omitted texts in the three translations,it is found that in the original event,the symbols related to the times,such as braid,opium,and bound feet,were omitted;apart from these,the dialogue of characters and the depiction of natural scenery were also omitted,and that in the conscious event,the author’s commentaries were omitted.In these omitted texts,in the three cultural symbols,braid,bound feet and opium,the first two are marked because in the 1930 s,these symbols gradually became pre-culture and were marked by current culture,while opium has always been marked as an alien culture;some dialogues of characters are marked because of the unusual language expression;however,the description of natural scenes in the omitted texts has no correlation with cultural markedness.Moreover,combined with the translators’ preface,it can be proved that there is a correlation between cultural markedness and the act of omission,but it is not absolute.Based on these,the potential consequences brought by translators’ processing of marked items can also be proposed:leaving the “thorn” caused by the alien will keep the possibility of “stinging” readers;while removing the alien will reduce the “thorn”,hide the problems in the original text,and reduce conflicts.