The Diachronic Change of H. Goldblatt's Translation Strategy-Based on the Analysis of His Translation of Image-contained Discourse in Mo Yan's Novels

H. Goldblatt has been translating Chinese literature for nearly 40 years and some scholars argue that his current translation strategy has turned from cultural manipulation to cultural dialogue, or from focusing on similarities to emphasizing differences. This paper investigates the diachronic change of Goldbaltt's translation strategy based on his translation of 500 image-contained phrases or sentences in Mo Yan's five novels, and finds that foreignization is always his major translation strategy because all the five translations retain more than 50% of the images contained in the selected data. Compared with the former three translations, his latter two pay more attention to retaining the images of the original texts and by doing so convey a little higher degree of foreignness of the source culture. However, it needs further research to fully prove the so-called turn of Goldblatt's translation strategy in his translation history.