A Study Of Shapiro's Translation Of The Characters' Nicknames In Outlaws Of The Marsh

Nicknaming is an expressive technique of art in the literary creation. In literary works, authors enjoy nicknaming the characters to make their temperament and images more vivid and make the readers remember them clearly and deeply. The author of Shui Hu Zhuan got the ideas from the historical stories or mythologies to nickname the characters. After the author's consummate refinement, the nicknames are integrated with the characters as a whole. Therefore, these nicknames reflect the author's personal selection of culture and aesthetic taste as well as the national aesthetic psychology.This thesis mainly probes the nicknames in Shui Hu Zhuan and analyzes Sidney Shapiro's translation of the characters' nicknames in Outlaws of the Marsh from the perspective of cross-cultural transmission. From the features of nicknaming the characters in Shui Hu Zhuan, we can find that the nicknames in the novel are loaded with profound culture, part of which is peculiar to the Chinese people, that is to say, the words in the source language don't have direct equivalents in the target language or the same conceptual words connote different cultural images in different languages, which is a major obstacle to translating. Venuti put forward two translation strategies from the perspective of cultural transmission: domestication and foreignization. Based on the analysis of the features of nicknaming in Shui Hu Zhuan and Shapiro's translation of the characters' nicknames, the paper is to explore the translation strategies Shapiro adopts to deal with different kinds of nicknames and the effectiveness of the strategies in the process of transfer of the linguistic features and of cultures from one language to another.On the basis of the analysis of Shapiro's translation, it is reasonable to draw such a conclusion that domestication and foreignization, which represent two different orientations, are not contradictory. In translation practice, translators should balance between the two to transmit the source culture faithfully and fully to the target readers and keep the translated version fluent and cohesive.With the development of the economic globalization, there is a growth of cultural communication. Translation is in fact cultural transmission to bridge the gap between different languages. At the end of the paper, some problems are brought forward how translators deal with cultural transmission in hopes that the discipline of translation can develop fully and systematically on the basis of translation practice.