Abstract

It’s well-known that Frog and some other representative works of Mo Yan won him the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, which brings about a fever of Mo Yan’s works both at home and abroad. Howard Goldblatt is the award-winning translator of numerous works of contemporary Chinese literature into English. He also translated many works of Mo Yan including Frog and is regarded as a major contributor and prompter of the popularity of Mo Yan’s works in Western world. The English version of Frog didn’t show up until the year of 2014 and since then, a heated discussion about the book has arisen in the West. The long novel describes the tough history of the implementation and resistance of the one-child policy in the countryside of Shandong, China during the past 60 years. 

Domestication and foreignization are the translation strategies firstly proposed by Lawrence Venuti (2004) in The Translator’s Invisibility. Foreignization originated from the deconstructionistic translation studies of Lawrence Venuti, while the theoretical basis of domestication is the “functional equivalence” theory advocated by Eugene Nida. This paper will try to analyze Howard Goldblatt’s choice of the two strategies when translating different texts in Frog. Advantages and disadvantages of both translation strategies will also be discussed in chapter 3 and chapter 4 in order to find a better way to popularize Chinese literature in the world.  

Howard Goldblatt once mentioned that the popularity of Chinese literature among western world is far behind that of Japanese literature. One reason is that there lacks good translators. In writing this paper, the author tries to find out why Howard Goldblatt’s translation is well-accepted by westerners and what choice he makes confronting the two translation strategies. Through this study, the author hopes that this paper may offer some constructive suggestions to the Chinese literature translation which may help to extent the influence of Chinese Literature.

Keywords: Howard Goldblatt, translation strategies, foreignization, domestication

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

Chapter 1 Introduction-1

1.1 Research Background-1

1.2 Howard Goldblatt’s View on Translation-2

1.3 Research Methods-4

Chapter 2 Literature Review-5

2.1 An Introduction of Domestication and Foreignization-5

2.2 Western Studies on Domestication and Foreignization-6

2.2.1 Domestication-6

2.2.2 Foreignization-7

2.3 Chinese Studies on Domestication and Foreignization-9

Chapter 3 Domestication and Its Corresponding Translation Methods in Frog-11

3.1 Domestication in Frog-11

3.2 Translation Methods under Domestication-14

3.2.1 Free Translation-14

3.2.2 Imitation-15

3.2.3 Variation-18

3.3 Summary of Chapter 3-20

Chapter 4 Foreignization and Its Corresponding Translation Methods in Frog-21

4.1 Foreignization in Frog-21

4.2 Translation Methods under Foreignization-22

4.2.1 Word-for-word Translation-23

4.2.2 Transliteration-24

4.3 Summary of Chapter 4-25

Chapter 5 Conclusion-26

References-27