On The Translation Strategy Of Dealing With Lexical Gap

Vocabulary is the foundation of one nation's language and culture. It reflects the culture and vice versa, culture changes the words. Different cultures lead to the result that the vocabulary of different languages varies so much. The vocabularies have been influenced and restricted by a nation's religious believes, customs and traditions, values and ideologies, so lexical gap occurs unavoidably and exists everywhere in everyday's life. For example, lexical gap could be found in science and technology, political-economic system, philosophy, religion, medical and athletic tradition, literature and social life and also manifest in the different grammatical categories between English and Chinese, like number, gender, person, tense and aspect etc. For many years, translators have made all efforts to reach the level of equivalence, which is called dynamic equivalence or translation equivalence. However, lexical gap causes most troubles on the way of getting equivalence and also evoke the discussion of translatability.This thesis aims to better recognize the phenomenon of lexical gap and find out how to adopt different translation strategies when dealing with lexical gap. In order to make statement of the problem well, the thesis is divided into five parts: 1) review of translation equivalence; 2) definition and categorization of lexical gaps from semantic, grammatical and pragmatic aspects; 3) causes of lexical gaps; 4) translation strategies of dealing with lexical gaps; and 5) conclusion...