A Study On The Translation Of Chinese Culture-specific Items In The U.S. News Media From The Perspective Of Reception Theory

Culture-specific items carry the cultural peculiarities most sensitively and directly. The time-honored history and splendid culture of China are most vividly reflected in the numerous Chinese culture-specific items, which present the most immediate problems for translators to solve. Against the backdrop of globalization, it is of immediate relevance to study the translation of Chinese culture-specific items.The previous studies on CSIs mainly focus on prescribing the translation strategies in handling CSIs, namely, whether to adopt the foreignization approach or the domestication one. The present thesis diverts the attention from"what should be done"to"what has been done"in rendering these cultural-specific items by using the U.S. news media as a databank for the analysis of the translation of Chinese CSIs in an attempt to analyze the translation approaches they adopted and to establish a series of variables to explain the possible reasons that impel them to choose those strategies based on reception theory.Moreover, this thesis offers an overview of the culture-specific items by describing the definition and the classification, identifying the translation problems they have posed, and proposing the possible translation strategies.The study shows that the U.S. news media takes a foreignization-dominated approach represented by literal translation and transliteration, focusing on retaining the foreign flavor while making efforts not to sacrifice the intelligibility through the combination of foreignization approach with the domestication one. Such strategies are influenced by many supratextual, textual, and intratextual factors such as the active role of the reader, horizon of expectations, informative function of news etc.