Translating Culture-specific Items: A Case Study Of The English Version Of Wei Cheng

Due to differences in geographical locations, social systems, religious beliefs, life styles, and ways of thinking, people in different nations have developed their specific cultural heritages. These cultural differences hinder effective cross-culture communication. With the rapid development of cross-culture communication, how to transfer cultural information, especially culture-specific items, faithfully to a foreign language, has become a problem in translation. This thesis is an endeavor in this direction.The culture-specific item has long attracted the attention of scholars at home and abroad. They have proposed a variety of strategies in translating such item, but have not reached consensus. Their views are summarized in this thesis.This thesis tries to do a tentative research on the translation of Chinese culture-specific items in the novel Wei Cheng by Qian Zhongshu. Wei Cheng contains lots of cultural elements about the China of the early 20th century, which are quite different from western culture. The culture-specific item is the direct reflection of a unique culture. How to convey culture-specific item as faithfully as possible without causing trouble in understanding is very important. Concerning this, Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao has done very well. In this paper, the author chooses Chinese culture-specific items from the first four chapters of the novel, classifies them by Nida's theory, analyzes their translation in the English version, and makes a statistic study on their translation strategies.According to the research on the translation of Chinese culture-specific items in Wei Cheng, the author hopes that new light would be shed on the translation of cultural factors in other literary works so that cultural gaps between Chinese people and others can be bridged.