The Translation Of Culture-specific Items In David T.Roy’s The Plum In The Golden Vase Or,Chin P’ing Mei

Jin Ping Mei is a racy masterpiece of sixteenth-century Chinese literature. As a novel of manners, it unfolds to display a panorama of the daily life in the late Ming period, offering a dazzling presentation of various Chinese cultural traditions. Notwithstanding the first translation of Jin Ping Mei into English can be traced back to the1920s, the arrival of a truly complete English version of the novel was celebrated only last September (2013), owing to the half-century painstaking efforts of American scholar and translator David T. Roy. This thesis sets out to examine the translation of culture-specific items (henceforth CSIs) in Roy’s rendition--The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei (Vol.1-5)--in the light of Javier Franco Aixela’s theories about CSIs.Translation studies has shifted its focus since the1970s, moving away from the search for linguistic equivalence, to the analysis of translation from the perspective of cultural studies. Since the "cultural turn", translation has been considered to extend far beyond a mere interlingual transference and to constitute a vital means of cross-cultural communication. The growth of intercultural awareness in the discipline has given rise to prosperous studies on the way cultural elements are tackled in translation process. Considering Jin Ping Mei is loaded with copious cultural references, the study on the treatment of CSIs in its newly released English translation assumes a special importance.This thesis conducts a pilot sample study, focusing on thirty randomly selected chapters of the original novel and their corresponding translations in Roy’s rendition. CSIs of typical and frequently occurring types are extracted and analyzed on the basis of Aixela’s ideas on CSIs. The results then are put into numerical mode so as to explore the frequencies of translation strategies applied to each type. For the sake of credibility, the author discusses the applicability of Aixela’s model in the present study and slight modifications are made accordingly. With reference to the list of explanatory variables proposed by Aixela, this thesis also probes into the possible motivations for the translator’s choice of translation strategies.Statistics obtained confirm the predominance of conservative approach toward the translation of CSIs in Roy’s rendering, which is a clear manifestation of the translator’s determination to convey as many cultural connotations of CSIs as possible to the receptor audience. Compared with the overwhelming tendency to conservative translation strategies in the treatment of proper nouns, a fine balance between Conservation/Substitution is found in that of common expressions. Roy’ s preference for the principle of Conservation falls under the influence of four facors:1) the nature and expectations of potential readers;2) nature and aims of the initiators;3) working conditions and training of the translator;4) degree of canonization of the ST. Three translation strategies that Aixela leaves out are observed in the selected data and tentatively named by the author, i.e. reversion, metonymy and emendation, which hopefully will provide a valuable supplement to Aixela’s taxonomy.