Translation of Chinese Political Terms in Frog From the Perspective of Cultural Identity of Translator

Abstract

Mo Yan’s masterpiece Frog has a large number of Chinese political terms which reflect the characteristics of the times during the Cultural Revolution and family planning period. Howard Goldblatt translates this novel and achieves a big success in transmitting the meaning of the original text to English readers. Howard Goldblatt’s English translation version maintains the feature of Chinese culture and conforms to the expression habit of English readers, which conveys the Chinese culture and makes foreign readers easy to understand. This paper analyzes the translation of Chinese political terms in Mo Yan’s novel Frog in the light of cultural identity of translator in order to provide a new perspective for the translation of Chinese political terms. Some translation methods are adopted in translation: The method of literal translation maintains the feature of Chinese culture and makes the translated text faithful to the original text; Amplification can make the translated text clear for foreign readers to understand; Omission considers the cognitive context of foreign readers and omits some unnecessary words in the process of translation; Free translation is used to explain the meaning of Chinese political terms in the original text.