摘 要

现如今，人名翻译在文学作品翻译以及文化交流中都扮演着越来越重要的角色。 其主要原因是作者们往往将他们的观点蕴含于人名之中。 若译者在翻译人名时简单地用拼音法将其转化，那么外国读者们将会失去在人名中发现言外之意的乐趣。尽管人名翻译取得了一些比较大的进步，但目前仍没有形成一个系统的人名翻译的指导性理论。本文以莫言代表作《蛙》和《红高粱》为例，探讨了两部作品中人名的文体特征，例如语言学特征、文化特征、社会特征和宗教特征等等，并对译者在翻译这两部作品时所采取的翻译方法进行了一个分类说明。

本文分为五个部分。第一部分介绍了人名翻译及莫言的作品。第二部分描述了人名翻译的发展过程及现状。第三部分从文体特征的几个方面详细分析了两部作品中的人物名称。第四部分讨论了以上分析对人名翻译和文章翻译的影响。最后一部分得出结论，并指出本文所存在的局限。本论文的分析旨在推动读者对人名翻译重要性的认识以及为构建指导性理论系统提供一定的参考。

关键词：人名翻译；《蛙》；《红高粱》

Abstract

Name translation plays a more and more important role in literature translation and cultural communications nowadays. Because the authors often design names containing implications and connotations to express their views. If the translators only use Pinyin to transform personal names, sometimes foreign readers will lose the fun of finding the hidden meanings in those names. Though large progress in name translation has been made, there still exists the lack of systematic theories and principles for name translation. This paper, taking the examples of Mo Yan’s most popular works-Frogs and Red Sorghum, analyzes personal names characterized by the linguistic features, cultural features, social and religious features in those two works and classifies the name translation methods used by the translator.

This paper will be generally divided into five parts. The first part is introduction to name translation and Mo Yan’s work. The following part is literature review over the present situation of name translation. In the third part, personal names in literature works will be analyzed in detail from the perspective of feature study. The fourth part discusses the effects of analysis above for the name translation and the novel translation. The last part is the conclusions, including some limitations. The analysis of this paper is aimed at raising readers’ recognition of the importance of name translation and providing a certain reference for forming a system under a set of name translation principles.

Key Words: name translation; Frogs; Red Sorghum

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Literature Review 3

3 Feature Study of Name Translation 5

3.1 Linguistic Feature 5

3.1.1 Name as a Sign 5

3.1.2 Name as an Image 6

3.1.3 Name as a Context 7

3.2 Cultural Feature 8

3.2.1 Name for Indication 8

3.2.2 Name for Satire 9

3.2.3 Name for Symbolism 10

3.3 Social Feature 11

4 Effects of the Feature Study 13

4.1 Effects for the Name Translation 13

4.2 Effects for the Novel Translation 14

5 Conclusions 16

References 17

Acknowledgements 18

The Feature Study of the Name Translation in Mo Yan’s Works

——Based on Frogs and Red Sorghum

1. Introduction

With regards to the Chinese culture, one of the most extensive and profound cultures in the whole world, there exist plenty of difficulties in translating Chinese literature. In the history of literature translation in China, name translation is a part most likely to be ignored for it is more difficult, sophisticated and subtle, especially when the original version includes many slangs, local idioms and so on. However, names in Chinese literature play a vital role in works, in representing Chinese culture or featuring characters in a piece of work.

In 2012, Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, being the first Chinese to show the whole world the traditional Chinese-style literary works. Consequently, his works become very prevalent in translation circle. Mo Yan’s works, which belongs to a special genre called native-soil literature, mostly describe the sufferings and hardships of peasants with the topic of village life, making his works full of Chinese traditional cultural features, especially those names of characters. These personal names not only are some symbols identifying each person, but also represent their respective characteristics. When translated to other languages, there is no doubt that name translation can be a tough task. The translated names should convey their deep meaning in Chinese to readers while being translated under the general translation principle.

From this perspective, this paper—taking the examples of the most excellent and popular top two works of Mo Yan, Frogs and Red Sorghum—tries to explain and analyze the translation strategies and methods used by translators, as well as appreciate its advantages and disadvantages by doing so. The purpose of this paper is that through all the analysis, the translated names can be better understood and absorbed by foreign readers, so it is with Chinese traditional culture(Wan, 2014).What’s more, some regular rules can be found and can be applied to later similar translation works or native-soil literature, promoting the greater development of name translation even literature translation in a great way.

In preparation of the paper, the author does the following work to enrich the whole paper: First, the author researches the relevant books, journals and net resources for more information. Second, the author classifies each translated name into different sorts and analyzes the reasons why the translator choose to translate them in this way as well. Third, the author evaluate each translation method in terms of two perspectives, i.e. advantages and disadvantages. Fourth, the author chooses Frogs and Red Sorghum as the representatives of Mo Yan’s works to complete this research. The author of the paper will explore this paper by collecting, sorting and searching books, journals from the library and on the Internet.

Literature Review

With the rapid development of literature translation in recent years, it can’t be denied that more and more importance has been attached to name translation and accordingly, fruitful papers or researches on it have emerged. However, there still exists an evident fact that name translation is on its first stage, without forming any systematic theories or a certain subject, and most of translation treats it with a casual attitude.

When talking about achievements on it, most of them are some general theories and rules, only a small part of them attaching those theories to a certain Chinese work to explain why the translator tends to translate these names in such a way. So far, such studies about name translation focus much more on masterpieces especially The Story of Stone and Journey to the West. As for other works, translators prefer to directly adopt Pinyin of characters’ names during translation, so there is not much research value for these works.

According to a rough research, Mo Yans’s major works like Frogs and Red Sorghum has been translated into more than 40 languages. The reason why Mo Yan became the first Chinese who won the Nobel Prize for Literature is mostly because of his own effort. In the meanwhile, some credits should be given to those translated versions as well.

However, according to my research on the Internet, most of the theses or papers that study on Frogs or Red Sorghum focus on any perspectives of translation other than name translation. For example, as far as Frogs is concerned, the studies on this work emphasize two aspects: one is the analysis of the whole literature translation, such as the paper Corpus-based Studies of Primary Exploration on the Translation of Frogs which was published by Liu Keqiang in 2015; and the other is the influences that the translation versions make on Chinese literature, like the paper Study on the Influences of Translators' Cultural Identities on the Translation of Chinese Native-soil Literature——Based on the Howard Goldblatt Version of Frogs, published on the magazine English Square by Peng Yuan in 2016. As for Red Sorghum, though there are many studies on its translation, most of them discuss translation from a certain macro-view, such as the perspective of eco-translatology or social translatology. There is also a small part study on translation from a microscopic view, e.g. The Linguistic Analysis of the Dialect Translation of Red Sorghum, which was published by He Li and Wang XiaoYi on the Journal of Northeast Normal University in 2014. But none of them focus on name translation, which is indeed a part that has been ignored by so many scholars.