A parallel corpus-based translation study of Mo Yan’s works: Methods and implications

Mo Yan is one of the most famous contemporary Chinese writers both at home and abroad. In 2011, he became the first person with Chinese nationality to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Howard Goldblatt is the key translator of his works into English. His translations of Mo Yan’s works are widely praised. It is thus meaningful to conduct a corpus-based study of Goldblatt’s English translations of Mo Yan’s works, focusing on his translation style, his translation strategies and how he managed to preserve cultural other in translation. Firstly, Mo Yan’s six major works, his style, and the translator H. Goldblatt’s translation ideas will be briefly reviewed. Secondly, the compilation of a 2.5-million-word/character Chinese -English parallel corpus of Mo Yan’s six key novels and their English translations by H. Goldblatt will be introduced. Preliminary findings will be elaborated with corpus data. Thirdly, the translation strategies (foreignization and domestication) and linguistic devices used by H. Goldblatt when translating Chinese color term 紅（Hong）will be analysed in detail. Last but not the least, implications of the study will be outlined and the value of the parallel corpus for translation teaching will be discussed.