Strategies For Chinese-English Translation Of Culture-Specific Items In Historical Texts

The interaction between cultures is an indispensable part of translation.How to translate the culture-specific items in the text is a big difficulty in translation.The term culture-specific item(CSI)was brought forward by Spanish translator Javier Franco Aixela.He divides culture-specific items into two basic categories:proper nouns and common expressions.Aixela also summarizes eleven culture-specific translation strategies,including repetition,orthographic adaptation,linguistic(non-cultural)translation,extratextual gloss,intratextual gloss,synonym,limited universalization,absolute universalization.naturalization.deletion,and autonomous creation.These translation strategies will serve as the main analytical framework for this report.The translator selects The Three Disputed Cases in the Late Ming Dynasty,a monograph focusing on the history of the Ming Dynasty,for translation practice.The book gives a succinct analysis of the three mysterious cases that took place in the late Ming court,providing readers who are interested in the history of the Ming Dynasty with a unique perspective to interpret the three cases.The report will delve into the culture-specific items in the book and explore the strategies for translating those CSIs.Aixela’s eleven translation strategies are applied as the analytical framework,but they cannot solve all the translation problems.Therefore,based on the translation process,the translator introduces two additional strategies:One is explanation,which can be achieved by introducing extra background knowledge or referring to the cultural information that has already appeared in the foregoing paragraphs of the translation.Different from the strategies of intratextual gloss and extratextual gloss proposed by Aixelá,it does not involve the procedures of repetition,orthographic adaptation or linguistic translation.The other is generalization,which refers to retaining and clarifying the main ideas of the CSIs when two or more similar CSIs appear in one sentence group.Statistics show that linguistic translation and intratextual gloss combined with linguistic translation have been the most frequently applied strategies for translating CSIs in this translation practice.Considering that they both fall into the category of conservative strategies,the translator holds the view that in the C-E translation of historical texts,CSIs in the source text tend to be reserved in the translated text.