On Translation Of Culture-Specific Words In The English Version Of Six Chapters Of A Floating Life

In the field of translation, the so-called principles of translation have ever been a big issue under discussion. They are, on the one hand, rules that every translator has to observe and, on the other hand, bases on which the quality of versions can be decided. In this paper, the set of principles of Faithfulness, Expressiveness and Closeness put forward by Liu Zhongde is adopted as the criterion to evaluate the English version Six Chapters of A Floating Life translated by Mr. Lin Yutang. After the analyses of content, wording and style of the English version, we can say it satisfies the basic requirements of faithfulness, expressiveness and closeness. Then his version can be regarded as a high- qualified one.On the other hand, literary translation is an important form of intercultural exchanges between China and the West. Culture covers a large area and language is only a part of it. So, similarly, language differences occupy only a small part among all cultural differences. Considering from the perspective of intercultural exchanges, our focus should not stay only at the level of language differences when translation is under our discussion. When other cultural differences are mentioned in language, they usually exist in the form of culture-specific words and bring some difficulties at the same time. However, these words usually contain some important cultural information that is necessary for our comprehension of a culture, so they should receive enough attention in translation study. In this paper, some culture-specific words from the original are compared with their counterparts from the English version in the following areas: 1. Mode of addresses, 2. Place names, 3. Units of measurement, 4. Some social customs, and 5. Others. The results of the comparisons clearly show that there are tremendous losses of cultural information in the above areas. However, the methods adopted by Mr. Lin Yutang in his version, as well as those of others, cannot succeed maintaining the important cultural information and simultaneously guaranteeing readability of the version. This can further prove the necessity of the discussion on translation of these words in cultural exchanges.