Culture-loaded Lexemes In Yuefu Poetry And Their Translation

Along with the more and more frequent economic exchange between China and the West, the cultural exchange also develops rapidly.More and more western readers long for the understanding of the rich Chinese culture.Yuefu poetry,a brilliant pearl of Chinese literature and culture,has a rich content and its literary styles are diverse.It loads the deep cultural connotation of Chinese people and reflects their traditional culture value orientation directly. Therefore,Yuefu poetry receives the Western translators' favour day by day.The school of cultural translation thinks that translation is a cultural communication.Based on this theory, starting off from one of the syntactical units—lexemes in Chinese and English languages,the thesis has a preliminary discussion about the cultural translation strategy on different versions of Yuefu poetry.The thesis holds that domestication and foreignization refer to the overall tendencies.For the sake of convenient analysis,various approaches are classified into seven types in this thesis.They are free translation,substitution,amplification,simplification, transliteration,literal translation and annotation.The thesis falls into three chapters.The introduction makes a simple historical retrospect over the Yuefu poetry and the relevant comments and actual translations made by some distinguished translators at home and abroad.Chapter One analyzes the relationship between culture,language and translation and emphasizes the absolute impact of culture upon the other two.Chapter Two first makes a historical retrospect over the definitions of cultural translation theory,and then reduces the scope of the study to the culture-loaded lexemes in Yuefu poetry. Later,according as Nida's classifications of culture,the thesis classifies the culture-loaded lexemes in Yuefu poetry into ecological culture,material culture,social culture,religious culture and linguistic culture and points out all sorts of difficulties the translators may meet during the process of translating and special questions needing to be paid more attention to.In Chapter Three,the mixed culture-loaded lexemes of Yuefu poetry are taken as examples for the statistical investigation of the specific translation method or method combinations.The thesis comes to the conclusion that the version with a single cultural translation strategy will not exist.Since the factors that domestication and foreignization lead to a relationship of substantial complementation both among different translators of the same source text and different target texts of the same translator.For the complementation of the two translation strategies,the translation's mission of cultural communication will be completed.