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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.