Reader-Oriented Account Of The Translation Of Culture-Specific Items

The culture-specific items cause problems during the translation process. A variety of strategies have been proposed by scholars and there seems no consensus reached. This paper discusses the treatment of culture-specific items in translation of J.K Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. It picks up a combined version of 6 strategies based on those posed by Aixela, Newmark, Christiane Nord, , Hervey& Higgin and others and analyzes the treatment of culture-specific items under these 6 headings. A simple statistics in Chapter 2 shows that the Mainland Chinese translator of this book conforms to some rules yet in general inconsistent in the application of procedures.Another particularity about this book is its specialty in its intended readership. This bestseller is written for the children originally and despite its expansion of readership when translated into a diverse range of languages it remains addicted to most of the children. By drawing on the ideas posed by Riita Oittinen in her Transalting for Children and the significance of intended readership identified by Christine Nord, Vermeer and others, it's argued that instead of delving into the specific strategies taken to deal with problems posed by the translation of CSIs, a broad brush stoke may be realized by studying all these problems from a new perspective---reader-oriented approach. It tries to figure out some regularity from the irregularity during the translation process from 4 perspectives: the readership nature, the readers'expectation, the reading experience, and the culture backdrop and ideology shared by the target readers. This new approach aims at providing a general framework for the chaotic situation during the translation process and leading to more reasoned and systematic decisions as to how to treat individual items from English into Chinese. And it's proposed to become one of the benchmark for translation evaluation and guide for translation practice.