A Comparative Study Of The Translation Of Culture-loaded Words In Na Han From The Perspective Of Translators’ Subjectivity

Lu Xun’s short story collection Na Han marks the beginning and development of new literature in China.The cultural connotation of culture-loaded words has attracted the attention of researchers at home and abroad and aroused the interest of translators.Among them are the Chinese translator Yang ＆ Dai’s translation and American translator Lyell’s translation as the representative.The translator’s subjectivity is reflected in every link of translation,which contains the rich thinking and wisdom of the translator.This study aims to observe the translation of culture-loaded words in different works,exploring how the translator plays the subjectivity in the process of reproducing the cultural connotation,summarizing the regular pattern between subjectivity and translation strategy selection,and explores the deep cultural factors behind their commonalities and differences.This thesis makes a descriptive study on the translation of culture-loaded words by using the Chinese-English parallel corpus of Lu Xun’s novels developed by Shaoxing University.Firstly,according to Peter Newmark’s definition of culture-loaded words and previous studies,this thesis divides culture-loaded words into three categories: material culture-loaded words,institutional culture-loaded words and ideological culture-loaded words.Secondly,it comprehensively selects the culture-loaded words in the original work of Na Han,and extracts the corresponding words in Yang’s translation and Lyell’s translation by using the Chinese English Parallel Corpus of Lu Xun’s novels.Finally,this thesis classifies a total of 121 groups of culture-loaded words and their corresponding translations,and tries to find out the specific differences in the choice of words between the two versions.At the same time,this study takes the translator’s subjectivity theory as perspective,further analyzes the main differences in the translation strategies between two translations.Through the analysis of linguistic data,this study obtains the following findings.Firstly,there are significant differences in the translations between Yang and Lyell,which reflect the objective existence of translator’s subjectivity to a certain extent.Secondly,when two translators choose different words,Yang Xianyi pays more attention to the reader’s overall understanding of the original text.He does not retain too many literal meanings of culture-loaded words in the translation,and usually chooses domestication strategy to deal with the translation problem;Lyell pays more attention to reader’s understanding of Chinese unique culture and tends to use alienation strategies to deal with translation problems.Finally,the factors affecting two translators’ subjectivity mainly lie in the translator’s historical background and cultural factors.As Yang Xianyi lives in China and has a deep understanding of the social and historical background during the May 4th movement,his translation is full of sympathy for the labouring people,but this feature is not significant in Lyell’s translation.The analysis of the expression forms of culture-loaded words in the two English versions of Na Han can not only provide new ideas and reference for the translation of Chinese literary works,but also enrich the research perspective of translator’s subjectivity,which promotes Chinese culture to go global.Of course,this study only extracts the culture-loaded words in Na Han as the research corpus,and its data support is still relatively small.In the future,Lu Xun’s other two short story collections Hesitation and Old Tales Retold can continue to be studied.