A Contrastive Study On The Translation Strategies Of Culture-Loaded Terms In Fusheng Liuji From The Perspective Of Translator Behavior Criticism

With the advancement of globalization and the continuous improvement of China’s comprehensive strength,Chinese culture has attracted more and more attention from the world.While actively implementing the opening-up policy,China is also in urgent need of spreading its culture.The translation of culture-loaded terms serves as one of the key steps to promote Chinese culture to the world.Therefore,how to translate the culture-loaded terms properly to promote the dissemination of Chinese culture has become an important topic in trans lation studies.Professor Zhou Lingshun’s Translator Behaviour Criticism is a theory focusing on the study of translator behaviour.The theory,breaking through the traditional dichotomous mode of judgment of translation,seeks to advance translation criticism to a stage where sociological study and textual study of translation are combined.From the perspective of the translator’s linguistic and social identity,Translator Behaviour Criticism is not limited to the analysis of texts,but takes into account more of the translator and the factors that influence the translator’s translation behavior,such as different living periods,social backgrounds,translation purposes,and target readers,thus realizing the perfect combination of intra-translational and extra-translational factors to evaluate the rationality of the translator’s behaviour and the target text based on the Evaluative Model of Truth-seeking-Utility-attaining Continuum.Translator Behavior Criticism can,therefore,provide the theoretical basis for the analysis of the translation of the culture-loaded terms in Fusheng Liuji by different translators.This paper combines Translators Behaviour Criticism with the translation of culture-loaded terms.Taking Lin Yutang’s and Graham Sanders’ translation of Fusheng Liuji as a case study,the paper contrasts the two translators’ different strategies in translating culture-loaded terms in the two versions.The present paper,based on the Evaluative Model of “Truth-seeking-Utility-attaining” Continuum,tries to investigate how the two translators’ behaviour of translating culture-loaded terms reflects their linguistic and social identities and further explore the intra-translational and extra-translational factors that influence their translation behaviour and strategies.In the course of study,the author adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods,such as literature research,exemplification and statistics.And based on Nida’s classification of culture,the author classifies the culture-load terms in Fusheng Liuji into five categories: ecological,religious,material,social and linguistic culture-load terms on the basis of Nida’s five-part division of culture.Through statistical and comparative analysis,the author tries to summarize the different translation strategies and methods adopted by Lin Yutang and Graham Sanders for the different categories of culture-loaded terms in the two translation versions.The specific findings are as follows:Firstly,Shen Fu,author of Fusheng Liuji,made extensive use of culture-loaded terms while representing his daily life,recalling his happy married life with his wife Chen Yun and recording his travels.As a result,Fusheng Liuji is characterized by a large number and a wide range of culture-loaded terms.The culture-loaded terms that appear in Fusheng Liuji can be classified into ecological,religious,material,social and linguistic ones,of which the most numerous are social culture-loaded terms,reaching110 and accounting for 35.6%,followed by 78 linguistic culture-loaded terms,43 material and geographical culture-loaded terms each,and 35 religious culture-loaded terms,the smallest in number.Secondly,through analysis we could find that Lin Yutang took preference for the translation strategy of domestication on the whole when translating the culture-loaded terms.He took the readers’ reading experience into account on the basis of being faithful to the original text.However,he also used different approaches while translating the culture-loaded terms,for example,the foreignization strategy and transliteration with the Wade-Giles Romanization to translate most of the material and ecological culture-loaded terms to retain the Chinese style on one hand while cater to the foreign readers’ habits of acceptance.Graham Sanders,on the other hand,reasonably used strategies of domestication and foreignization in the translation process in order to produce a balanced effect of introducing the Chinese culture and taking the acceptance of target readers into account.Thirdly,Lin Yutang and Graham Sanders chose different translation strategies for translating culture-loaded terms,which reflects the two translators’ different behaviors on the evaluative model of “Truth-seeking-Utility-attaining” Continuum.Although Lin Yutang had certain acts of “truth-seeking” to retain the characteristics of Chinese language and culture,he was closer to the readers,favoring “utility-attaining”,hoping that Western readers and scholars could also feel the couple’s happiness and the oriental philosophy of life and that the Chinese culture could be spread effectively.Graham Sanders’ translation was sometimes close to the “reader” end,sometimes close to the“original text” end which had struck a balance between “truth-seeking” and“utility-attaining”.He hoped to preserve the original text and minimize the obstacles for readers as well as laying the foundation for their understanding and study of Chinese culture.Fourthly,Lin Yutang’s “utility-attaining”-inclined behavior and Graham Sanders’ balanced approach are closely related to their respective purposes for translation,their own experience and social environment.In terms of the purpose of the translation,Lin Yutang wanted to introduce the lovely couple to the world and to help foreign readers feel the couple’s love for normal life.So he behaved in a “utility-attaining” manner in his translation.In addition,Lin Yutang had a thorough knowledge of both Western and traditional Chinese culture and he was flexible in using both Chinese and English as he had been educated in the Western way and immersed by the Chinese culture since he was a child though he lived in a time of turmoil,which laid the foundation for Lin Yutang’s “utility-attaining” act of translating culture-loaded terms.While Graham Sanders,as a teacher of Chinese,aimed to introduce Chinese culture to his students in detail beyond the linguistic aspects and the stories of the original,so he behaved in a balanced approach of both “truth-seeking” and “utility-attaining”.In conclusion,the translator is a social identity with an independent mind,whose translator behaviour is inevitably influenced by his or her initiative in the translation process.The focus on “human-first” translation behavior and the influencing intra-translational and extra-translational factors behind is conducive to interpret translators’ “truth-seeking”,“utility-attaining” and “rationality” in translating culture-loaded terms,helping promote translation criticism and research based on the translation process.