Strategies For Translating Culture-Specific Items In Chinese-English Translation:A Case Study Of The Road Of Tea

In the process of communication,the two parties often omit the self-evident content of shared background knowledge or pragmatic presupposition,which constitutes "culture default" if it is related to culture outside the discourse.As "culture default" is culturally specific,it creates a vacuum of meaning for those who do not belong to that culture and leads to comprehension difficulty.In the process of writing,another kind of communication,when a linguistic item poses problems of ideological or cultural opacity or acceptability for the average readers in the target culture,it becomes a culture-specific item（CSI）,posing translation challenges and difficulties.Therefore,how to deal with cultural differences has always been a focus of attention for the translation community.CSIs related to Chinese culture is the key to the dissemination of Chinese civilisation and Chinese thought to the world.As a result,it is an indispensable and important element in the cross-cultural communication,and is the essence and soul of human cultural diversity,which is of great significance in practice.According to the scholar Qiu Maoru,translators can adopt direct translation,repetition,transliteration,transliteration with classifier,substitution,interpretation and translation with meaning in order to establish cultural equivalence and achieve the purpose of communication.In 1997,Wang Dongfeng summarized five translation strategies,namely,literal translation added with annotations,literal translation plus free translation,naturalization,deletion,and hard translation,with the former two as the mainstay.In 1996,Javier Franco Aixelá,a Spanish translator,defined the concept of "culture-specific items"and grouped eleven strategies for translating CSIs by observing three translated versions into Spanish from the English detective fiction The Maltese Falcon,which are repetition,orthographic adaptation,linguistic（non-cultural）translation,extratextual gloss,intratextual gloss,synonymy,limited universalization,absolute universalization.naturalization,deletion,autonomous creation.Based on Qiu Maoru,Wang Dongfeng and Aixelá’s theory on the translation strategy of cultural-specific items,this report adopts a combination of manual and machine extraction of CSIs from The Road to Tea and selects relevant cases for analysis,focusing on the tea name,variety,origin,cultivation,harvesting,primary processing,refining,refining,added processing,and packaging in an attempt to explore the translation strategy of CSIs in tea culture.In this report,the first chapter introduces the definition of culture-specific items,in particular the characteristics,translation difficulties and significance of CSIs related to Chinese tea culture.The second and third chapters describe the task and the process of this translation project,with a brief introduction to The Road to Tea and its author,and the reasons for selection.The fourth chapter sets the analytical framework for this translation project based on the previous review by various distinguished scholars.The fifth chapter analyzes different kinds of cases in translating CSIs,which is the main body of this report.The concluding chapter summarizes the translation practice together with its limitations and the author’s suggestions for future research.On the whole,this theory can be applied to Chinese-English translation.Depending on the specific translation situation,a single strategy or a combination of two or more translation strategies can be used to achieve more satisfactory results and achieve the purpose of communication.To be specific,the strategies which fall into the conservative category,including transliteration plus classifier,linguistic（non-cultural）translation,extratextual gloss and intratextual gloss,are more frequently used than those based on substitution.To be specific,transliteration plus classifier can be adopted when it comes to the translation of the name,variety and birthplace of tea.If the CSIs related to tea cultivation,harvesting,primary processing,refining,added processing and packaging have very unique Chinese culture and connotations,the strategies of extratextual gloss and intratextual gloss can be considered by adding explanations in the forms of footnote or commentary/translation in brackets or within the text in case of interrupting the reader.The translator can also keep the denotative meaning of the source language with the adoption of linguistic（non-cultural）translation,especially for units of measure and currencies.However,this theory has its drawbacks.If applied to the study of English-Chinese translation,it needs to be modified,with different language habits of Chinese and English taken into account of.At the same time,it is important to study more real texts in order to improve this translation theory and better guide the practice of Chinese-English translation and promoting the sustainable development of Chinese tea.