Brazilian Sinologist Reis’s Translation Strategy: Comparing His Portuguese Translation of Mo Yan’s Novel Wa With Goldblatt’s English Version

Abstract

Amilton Reis is the first Brazilian sinologist who translated Nobel Prize Winner Mo Yan’s novels from Chinese into Portuguese. He has translated Mo Yan’s Bian (Mudança/Change, 2013), Sanshi nian qian de yici changpao (Uma corrida há 30 anos/A long run thirty years ago) and Wa (As rãs/Frog, 2015). This paper, based on first-hand examples, takes his Portuguese translation As rãs as the research object, and examines his translation strategy from aspects of cultural replacement, cultural omission, cultural dilution, cultural interpretation, cultural annotation, cultural literal translation, language beautification, language dilution, and so on. In order to better understand the characteristics of his translation strategy, this article compares his Portuguese translation with the English translation Frog by American sinologist Howard Goldblatt. The study found that, while Goldblatt’s translation strategy is basically “reader-oriented”, Reis’s translation strategy is more “reader-oriented” or “reader-centered”.