Mo Yan’s style in using colour expressions and Goldblatt’s translation strategies: a corpus-based study

As China is trying hard to present Chinese literature to the outside world, it is imperative to carry out more research on Chinese-English translation studies. Through a corpus-based approach, this study aims to investigate Mo Yan’s style in using colour expressions, and the translation strategies adopted by Goldblatt when translating these expressions. Howard Goldblatt is the key English translator who has translated Mo Yan’s major works into English. His translations of Mo Yan’s works have been widely praised. One distinctive feature of Mo Yan’s language lies in his creative use of colour expressions. In the English translation, Goldblatt has preserved Mo Yan’s distinctive style in using colour expressions. Through close investigation of a 2.5-million-word/character Chinese-English parallel corpus of Mo Yan’s six key novels and their English translations by Goldblatt compiled for this research, it is found that, while translating Chinese four-word colour idioms or clusters, Goldblatt mainly adopts domestication strategy supplemented by foreignization and has successfully disseminated Chinese culture to target readers. Last but not least, omission is seldom adopted in rendering four-word colour idioms or clusters, which proves that faithfulness is one important guideline Goldblatt has adhered to in translation.