A C-E Translation Report On Culture-Loaded Words In Dunhuang: Home To My Heart(Excerpts)

This translation report is based on the translation practice of the chapter four and chapter thirteen of the autobiography Dunhuang: Home to My Heart of Fan Jinshi,who is known as“the daughter of Dunhuang”.By virtue of the mapping in cognition,this report aims to explore the translation methods of the culture-loaded words in the biographical literature.This work records her legendary life,demonstrates Dunhuang cultural relics and the related history,and praises the efforts made by other scholars in modern times for the protection of cultural relics.In the translation process,the author finds that the difficulty of translation mainly comes from a large number of culture-loaded words related to Dunhuang historical relics,the traditional Chinese culture and the historical events in the source text.Taking the application of mapping in the translation process as the theoretical framework,this thesis employs different translation methods for culture-loaded words in terms of cultural mismatch and cultural default in mapping.For the cultural mismatch in mapping,the author mainly adopts two translation methods: free translation and adaptation.Free translation allows the author to achieve the match in meaning,free from the constraints of the original text in terms of the sentence pattern,part of speech,etc.Adaptation refers to explaining culture-loaded words with the existing expressions in the English culture,which is helpful for the target readers to understand their meanings.As to the cultural default in mapping,the author mainly adopts the methods of transliteration with footnotes,transliteration with explanation in brackets,literal translation,and literal translation with footnotes to establish a new connection between the source and target domains in mapping.As to the combination of transliteration and footnotes,first,it realizes the correspondence in form with the concept in the source text.Then,supplemented by the footnotes,the target language readers can have a comprehensive understanding of the meaning of culture-loaded words.Transliteration with explanation in brackets is used in the translation of important cultural relics and Buddhist terms.It makes the target language readers not only know the pronunciation of their Chinese names,but also understand their specific referential meanings at the same time.Literal translation is applied to the culture-loaded words which have had established English translations.Literal translation with footnotes refers to the translation of culture-loaded words through word for word translation,to get the corresponding translation in English.Then,added with the footnote,the internal logic of the culture-loaded words is explained and the readability of the translation is ensured.This report discusses the translation of the culture-loaded words in the biographical literature from the perspective of mapping.It is hoped that this report will provide some useful references for the Chinese-English translation of culture-loaded words,introducing Dunhuang culture and promoting the Chinese culture to go global.