A Study on the Translation of Yumi From the Sociological Perspective

Abstract

Yumi, a representative work of Bi Feiyu, wins Lu Xun Literary Prize and its English Verison Three Sisters, translated by Howard Goldblatt and his wife Sylvia Lin-chun Lin, wins the fourth Man Asian Literary Prize, making this book popular both at home and abroad. Domestic and oversea scholars try to analyze both the original work and its English version. After having a comprehensive research on related studies, we find that there are few previous studies on the translation of Yumi and few theories are applied to their analyses. Although there have been many studies on the translator Goldblatt, many of them focus on Mo Yan’s works, but few on Bi Feiyu’s novels. Therefore, there is much to be explored in this field. This article aims to analyze the translation of Yumi from the perspective of sociology with the help of the theory of Pierre Bourdieu, trying to make clear different factors that play a role in the process of translation of Yumi. Under the framework of Bourdieu’s sociological theory, the analysis is conducted from three aspects: field, capital and habitus, all of which are core ideas of Bourdieu’s sociological theory.