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There are also studies which assess and evaluate the translation of Howard Goldblatt from different theoretical perspectives. For instance, Goldblatt’s translation of Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearying Me Out has been analyzed in the perspective of narratology with special focus on narrative voice, narrative point of view, and metalepsis (邵璐, 2012). The same translation is again under examination with emphasis on metalepsis, paralipsis narrative, and pseudodiegetic narrative (邵璐, 2013). Huang Libo and Zhu Zhiyu make a substantial study of Goldblatt’s translation style with reference to linguistic corpora (2012).
All in all, studies and researches on the translation of Mo Yan’s works exist in quantities and increase quickly. However, few of them examine the translational arts of over-translation and under-translation, much less studies with a focus on the particular novel The Garlic Ballads of Mo Yan. This encourages the researcher to continue the study.
1. 3 Research Question
The research question is as follows: how do the over-translations and under-translations function in the establishment of expressiveness of the novel while maintaining its fidelity to the original text?
1. 4 Theoretical Framework
1. 3. 1 Functional Translation Theory
Eugene A. Nide observes that there is a dynamic orientation when thinking about translational equivalence. In Basics of Translation Studies (2007), his functional equivalence is summarized as follows: by dynamic equivalence, “the relationship between translation and target-language recipients should correspond, roughly, to the relationship between the source text and the source-language recipients.”(p. 58) Whether a translator achieves dynamic equivalence or not is assessed by four criteria: lexical equivalence, syntactical equivalence, semantic equivalence, and stylistic equivalence.
However, among these four levels of equivalence, the semantic level is of the most importance and therefore top priority. Nida himself, in his monograph On Translation (1984), has admitted that “no two words in any two languages ever seem to have precisely the same meanings”(p. 51), that the ways in which language organize words into syntactic structures are “perse”(p. 51), and that different rhetorical features seem to be “perplexing complications”(p. 51). Therefore, it is unrealistic to pursue an entire equivalence between target and source texts in lexicon, syntactic structures or writing or spoken styles, which means to achieve the semantic level of equivalence should be the primary focus of translators.
Besides, Nida maintains that “the fact that languages may employ quite different forms to express essentially the same meaning is almost a truism”(p. 53), and that “there are, of course, serious problems in translating when the form in which something is said carries considerable meaning”(p.53). Obviously, what Nide insists is the importance of the expression of meaning rather than the presentation of forms. Therefore, the semantic equivalence should be given priority when translating.
1. 3. 2 The Definitions of Over-translation and Under-translation
The concepts of over-translation and under-translation are put forward by Perter Newmark in his monograph Approaches to Translation. Over-translation is the translation phenomenon in which the target text carries more information than the source text, while under-translation, quite the contrary, is the translation phenomenon in which the target text carries less information than the source text.
1. 5 Research Methodology
The research is descriptive and qualitative. Under the theoretical framework of functional translation theory, it mainly adopts the research method as to read closely and compare and contrast both the Chinese and English versions of The Garlic Ballads, which, based on a thorough examination of literature on over- and under-translation, will establish a rich databank for detailed case studies to be done.