Cultural Loss And Compensation In The Two English Versions Of Shui Hu Zhuan-A Socio-semiotic Approach

The recent twenty years have witnessed an obvious tendency in the translation study that translation is defined as the cross-cultural communication. Increasing importance, hence, is attached to cultural translation by the translators. Focusing on translations from Chinese to English, the present thesis is an attempt to analyze the different types of cultural losses and explore the ways to decrease the cultural losses to a minimum.One of the most commonly seen phenomena in translation practice is cultural loss, which is inevitable because of the discrepancies between different cultures. The current study uses socio-semiotic theory to explore the losses of cultural elements. Socio-semiotic theory offers a most comprehensive summation of the sign's meaning, which is the network of the relationship between vehicle, referent and interpreter. Meaning thus falls into three categories: referential, linguistic and pragmatic meaning. Based on the socio-semiotic criterion "correspondence in meaning and similarity in function", this paper analyzes and evaluates the three kinds of meaning losses: the losses of referential meaning, the losses of linguistic meaning and the losses of pragmatic meaning.These losses need to be offset by various strategies of cultural compensation so as to enable the target language reader to appreciate the exotic culture to the same extent as the source language reader. While resorting to different ways of cultural compensation, translators should abide by three principles: the principle of information, the principle of intelligibility and the principle of consistency. Guided by these three principles, translators should select the most appropriate strategy of cultural compensation to yield a translation that is linguistically and culturally valid, intelligible and acceptable.Shui Hu Zhuan is a masterpiece of classical Chinese literature and often compared as an encyclopedia of Chinese culture. Besides, the translators of its two well-known English versions, Sidney Shapiro and Pearl S. Buck are all masters of languages and experienced translators. Therefore, this novel deserved to be selected as a case study to explore the studies of cultural loss and compensation in the process of translation. If cultural compensation is accomplished, it will help reduce cultural conflicts and further put forward the cultural communication among different countries. The author of this paper hopes more studies will be conducted in this area to promote the cultural exchanges between different cultures.