A Case Study On Translation Strategies Of Culture-Specific Items In Happy Dreams

Gao Xing is written by Jia Pingwa over a period of three years,during which he changed the draft six times.This novel adopts the first-person narrative method with witty and humorous language,vividly portraying the life of the trash pickers in Xi’an city of Shaanxi Province.By comparing the original work Gao Xing with its English version Happy Dreams,the author conducts a case study on the translation strategies of culture-specific items in Happy Dreams by borrowing from Aixelá’s classification of translation strategies for culture-specific items.The author summarizes four types of culture-specific items of personal names,religion-involved items,food names and names of historical figures,with a total number of 139.The study finds that the translator adopts strategies of "transliteration","linguistic(non-cultural)translation","absolute universalization" and "naturalization" when translating personal names in the novel,among which "transliteration" and "linguistic(non-cultural)translation" account for 39%respectively.When translating the religion-involved items,strategies adopted by the translator include "transliteration","linguistic(non-cultural)translation","intratextual gloss","absolute universalization" and "naturalization",among which "linguistic(non-cultural)translation" accounts for 50%.When translating the food names,strategies adopted by the translator include "transliteration","linguistic(non-cultural)translation","intratextual gloss","limited universalization","absolute universalization" and"naturalization",among which "linguistic(non-cultural)translation" accounts for 66%.When translating the names of historical figures,strategies adopted by the translator include"transliteration","intratextual gloss","absolute universalization","naturalization" and"deletion",among which "intratextual gloss" and "deletion" account for 32%respectively.It can be seen that the translator chooses the main translation strategies based on different types of culture-specific items.Although most of the translations of culture-specific items convey the cultural information of the original text,some of them failed to reflect the cultural connotations of the original text.In conclusion,various translation strategies should be adopted when translating different types of culture-specific items.