A corpus-based study on the convey of “elsewhere” images in Goldblatt’s translation
of Red Sorghum
Abstract
The translator of Red Sorghum, Howard Goldblatt, was specially mentioned in the
award speech for his great contribution when Moyan received the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 2012. It is safe to say that Goldblatt’s representative translation work,
Red Sorghum - A Novel of China, occupies an important position in translation of
Chinese literature into English. The aim of this study is to explore how images in
Moyan’s original work, Red Sorghum, are represented in the translation in order to
offer some new insights into the role of translation in cross-cultural understanding
and appreciation of literary works.
The study employed the corpus-based approach, and Leech and Short’s (1981)
stylistic feature checklist of figures of speech was adopted as our operational
framework. First we built a parallel translation corpus aligning each sentence in
Chapters 1 & 2 of Red Sorghum and Goldblatt’s translation. With the aid of
Wordsmith, a corpus analytic tool, we investigated what sort of images were
represented in both the original work (Elsewhere) and the translated literature (Here)
by extracting the top 10 object nouns with highest occurrence frequencies; A
comparison of these nouns led us to conclude that the most important images in the
original work were not altered in the translation. Furthermore, we investigated what
figures of speech were employed in the original work and in the translation, and
explored how the translator successfully conveyed three of the most important
images across cultures. The findings and discussions of the figures of speech in our
study have indicated that creative metaphors (noun phrases accompanied with like,
as, and as if), repetitions, personifications, and symbolisms (the co-occurring
adjectives of the nouns representing the images) produce special stylistic effect and
artistic appeal in the translation.
Keywords: parallel translation corpus, cross-culture, image, Goldblatt, Moyan, Red
Sorghum, figures of speech