关键词: 《红高粱》; 创造性搭配; 葛浩文; 英译; 中国当代文学

Abstract: Collocation is an important category of language patterning. The concept “collocation” was proposed by British linguist J.R. Firth, referring to the company words keep. However, collocations are not at random, which means the component words in collocations usually are supposed to meet certain semantic or logical conditions. Nonetheless, in reality, in particular in literary works, certain collocations do contravene the expected semantic or logical restrictions. In fact, these kinds of creative collocations are an important aspect of the creativeness of literary works. Therefore, creative collocations are an important issue in literary translation. On the one hand, collocations, in particular in terms of creative collocations, are practically difficult to translate across languages due to systemic as well as habitual differences. On the other hand, studies of translation of creative collocation in literary works will contribute to the exploration of the creativeness issue in translation studies. Due to the above two considerations, this article explores Howard Goldblatt’s English translation strategies of creative collocations in Mo Yan’s famous novel Red Sorghum. The findings show that: (1) over half of the creative collocations in the original Chinese Red Sorghum are preserved in Goldblatt’s English version, which implies that creative collocations in Chinese literary works can be rendered into English; (2) in the meanwhile, almost half of the creative collocations are normalized in Goldblatt’s English version, which means, on the one hand, they are hard to translate across cultures, and on the other hand, the creativeness of Chinese literary works somewhat suffer losses in English translation

Keywords: Red Sorghum; creative collocation; Howard Goldblatt; English translation; modern Chinese literature