A Semiotic Study On C-E Translation Of Culture-Loaded Lexes In Chinese Tourist Literature

As Chinese tourism industry is booming, the C-E translation of Chinese tourist literature becomes more significant. Its translation is never just the transference between two languages but an intercultural communication. While the study on it is a new topic, in recent years, new linguistic theories have been employed to study this special genre, and Chinese scholars have studied its translation from different aspects too, such as cross-cultural or genre analysis, but few do it comprehensively and thoroughly, especially the study on that of culture-loaded lexes, which is the difficulty in the C-E translation. Culture-loaded lexes are those culturally specific words or expressions. Relatively speaking, they are the most sensitive language items and direct reflections of a nation's culture. It is difficult and even impossible for a translator to find an equivalent for a culture-loaded word or expression in the target language. This thesis uses semiotic theory to study the C-E translation of culture-loaded lexes, which is a challenging try. The core of the semiotic translation approach is the meaning theory of semiotics, that is, the three-dimension meanings of signs (designative meaning, linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning). Meanwhile, this approach absorbs language function theory. And its criterion is correspondence in meaning and similarity in function. To apply semiotics to translation can grasp the function and meaning of the source language macroscopically, reproduce them microcosmically, which is helpful to improve the translation quality. First, the author reviews its present situation and problems home and abroad; secondly she discusses the development of semiotics and semiotic translation process and criteria. Then with this guidance, she puts the theory into practice and employs a large quantity of translation examples of culture-loaded lexes to analyze this theory; and she lists the translation methods used in decoding the three semiotic meanings. Lastly she classifies other problems in this translation, the limitations of the study in this paper and the suggestions on the further study.The author tries to supply a new and thorough theoretical framework for the C-E translation of Chinese tourist literature based on semiotics. Perhaps her efforts aren't successful, but if more people could put forth more advice and improve translation study in the future, and make it more scientific and directive. That will be enough!...