关键词: 《生死疲劳》; Malinowski; 语境论; 误译; 葛浩文

Abstract:

Howard Goldblatt is the most noted and the most productive English translator of modern Chinese novels. However, by careful reading and analysis of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out written by the first Chinese Nobel Prize writer Mo Yan, three categories of mistranslations in this novel are discovered: 1) the mistranslation caused by the translator’s lack of thorough understanding of the cultural background in the source language; 2) the mistranslation caused by lack of discourse analysis and insufficient grasp of the situational context; 3) the mistranslation caused by negligence of numbers, names, consistence and other detailed errors. Malinowski, the founder of modern context theory, put forward the triarchic theory of contexts, which are “the context of culture”, “the situational context” and “co-text”. By catering to the co-working of the three types of contexts, we can improve the accuracy of the translation as well as reducing information deviation and loss. Meanwhile, this paper aims to re-translate the mistranslations in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by employing the triarchic theory of contexts, thus hopefully it can provide some meaningful references to the further development and transmission of Chinese literature in the western countries.

Keywords: Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out; Malinowski; context theory; mistranslation; Goldblatt