Red Sorghum, among Mo’s finest works, is the first to have been introduced to audience overseas. American sinologist Howard Goldblatt, as its English translator, had the English version first published in the United States in 1993. Part of Mo’s success in winning the Nobel Prize is attributed to his translators, especially to Goldblatt, who is said to not only vividly recount Mo’s story in English, but demonstrate greater written proficiency in his translation (Wang, 2012). This evaluation most likely is faithful, although when it comes to folklore, cultural differences probably obstruct it from being properly translated. Whether or not Goldblatt did a successful job in translating the folklore is not going to be judged here, but this paper intends to provide alternative solutions to the examples of folklore translation that show problems in equivalence.
Frame semantics, an important theory in cognitive semantics, connects the meaning of a word with its related background knowledge. Its notion of frame is believed to be effective in “explaining the role of cultural background in translation and the way a translator deals with the text” (Xiao, 2012, p. 38). Proposing frame semantics as the analysis approach, this study focuses on solutions to the difficulties presented by folklore elements in Red Sorghum when translated into English.
The paper starts by giving a literature review of current studies on Goldblatt’s version of Red Sorghum, folklore translation and semantic frames, followed by introductions of frames, frame elements as well as features of frames. Then a frame-based equivalence is proposed to introduce frame reconstruction in translation, which, later on is applied to the analysis of examples drawn from Red Sorghum and its English version.
2 Literature review
2.1 Goldblatt’s version of Red Sorghum
Since Mo’s winning the Nobel Price, there is a major increase in the studies on Goldblatt’s version of Red Sorghum. In general, they fall into two categories.

One focused on Goldblatt’s translation characteristics by analyzing his version of Red Sorghum and other translations of Mo’s works. Sun Huijun(2014) tried to identify Goldblatt’s translation characteristics by exploring the differences in story details, story-telling styles and language proficiency between the Chinese novels and their English versions. Hou Yu, Liu Zequan and Liu Dingjia(2014) analyzed a corpus of language parameters from Goldblatt’s translations of Mo’s works in an attempt to learn Goldblatt’s translation style.

The other analyzed translation techniques with examples from Goldblatt’s version of Red Sorghum. There are studies that discussed translation strategies for culture-loaded words, that studied cultural misreading in literary translation and that explored the translation of dialects, for example, He Li & Wang Xiaoyi(2014) discussed the incorrectness and inadequacy in translation of dialects by analyzing a corpus of translations of Gaomi dialects from Red Sorghum. Though some studies discuss cultural elements in Red Sorghum, they don’t specifically focus on folklore.
2.2 Folklore translation
The notion of folklore was created in the middle of the 1840s by William Thomas who put together “folk” (people) and “lore” (knowledge) to make reference to folk customs. He viewed Folklore as “manners, custom, observances, superstition, ballade, proverbs, etc.” and “traditional beliefs, legendary and custom transmitted in people” (Li, 2012, p. 20). The basic idea is that folklore constitutes a major part of the culture within a community. In general, folklore manifests itself in material, society, spirit and language. Material folklore describes local custom in clothing, food, housing, transportation, etc. Social folklore refers to long-established practice in a community such as marriage and funeral traditions. Spiritual folklore is spiritual practices of a group related to religions, beliefs, superstitions, fortune-telling, etc. And language folklore can be found in local idioms, legends and other oral literature.
上一篇:德语论文浅析中德会展的新领域婴童用品展行业
下一篇:从功能对等角度看水浒传人物绰号翻译中的文化意象传递

《嘉莉妹妹》中报纸的象征意义

《魔山》特殊的疗养院时代差异性分析

从电影学角度解析《彗星...

德语论文从社会心理学的...

德语论文论《美狄亚声音...

德语论文电影《浪潮》中...

《呼啸山庄》中希斯克利...

结肠透析机治疗慢性肾功...

沉箱码头设计国内外研究现状和参考文献

社会工作视野下医患关系的冲突与协调

论好莱坞电影中的中国文化元素

谈人机工程学在公共电话亭设计中的应用

18岁可以學什么技术,18岁...

稀土伴生放射性冶炼厂环境放射性水平调查

浅谈芭蕾舞外开与中国古典舞外旋的区别

原位离子交换法合成AgBrAg3PO4复合光催化材料

中学地理生活化教学研究