A Study on English Translation of Dialects in Desert Rites from the Perspective of the "Ten-tion" Eco-Translation Methods

Abstract

With increasing cultural communications between China and the international community, dialects have become a significant vehicle for conveying local folk customs and aesthetics. The novel Desert Rites, written by Xue Mo and translated from Chinese into English by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin, makes use of many dialectal expressions to describe the agricultural and pastoral life of the Hexi region. Through the utilization of Hu Gengshen's "Ten-tion" Eco-Translation Methods in the context of Eco-Translatology, this paper carries out a parallel reading of the Chinese original text and its English version. It studies the transformation process of various dialectical expressions in the translation process and the guiding principles of such transformations. Four strategies, namely "Source-Contextualization", "Target-Contextualization", "Adaptive Reduction" and "Imitationalization" have been found to be used by the translators in order to achieve a multidimensional balance in the translational ecosystem through the balancing of preserving the local characteristics of Liangzhou region and readability for the target readers.