How Does “Rural Flavor” Go Global?

Following Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the global dissemination of Chinese literature has garnered significant attention, with dialect translation emerging as a critical challenge. His novel Red Sorghum Family is rich in Gaomi Northeast dialect, and Howard Goldblatt’s translation has achieved widespread international influence. While striving to balance reader accessibility with cultural authenticity, his approach to dialect translation involved compromises due to multiple factors, leading to divergent academic opinions on his treatment of dialect. This paper examines Howard Goldblatt’s dialect translation strategies across four dimensions—lexicon, idioms, syntax, and cultural imagery—to evaluate their effectiveness and provide insights for translating Chinese literary dialects.