A Study Of Culturally-loaded Words Translation From The Perspective Of Cultural Equivalence

With the increasing popularity of cross-cultural communication, a shift from a linguistic approach to a cultural approach has been found in translation studies. Now translation has been broadly regarded as an act of intercultural communication. As the crystallization of human language and culture, culturally-loaded words translation has drawn attention in the translation field, but it is far from being satisfactory, from which, to a great extent, is culturally derived. As a matter of fact, the influences of culture on the culturally-loaded words are so pervasive that scarcely any text can be adequately understood without a profound knowledge of its cultural background, let alone an exact translation of it.This paper, based on a thorough study of the culturally-loaded words, aims at discussing the translation of culturally-loaded words from the angle of conveying cultural information. Therefore, making a deep comparative study of culturally-loaded words from a cultural perspective is not only helpful to have a good grasp of the meaning and use of the language, but also will improve the translation quality, thereby facilitating intercultural communication.This thesis falls into five chapters:Chapter one is an introduction of the background of present study, the questions needed to be answered in this study and the purpose of the study, and the significance of it.Chapter two first gives the definition of culturally-loaded words, and then analyzes the relationship between the culture-loaded words and the life experience, myths, legends and fables, historical events and famous figures, religions as well as the development of science and technology in each country. The following part is devoted to the translatability of culture-loaded words and classifies it into cultural translatability, cultural semi-translatability and cultural non-translatability.Chapter three starts by introducing equivalence theory, giving special attention to three great translators and translation theorists: Yan Fu, Nida and Newmark. Combining Yan Fu's translation principle of Xin,Da and Ya, Nida's functional equivalence, and Newmark's communicative translation, this paper presents they all emphasize the important influence of culture on translation, so cultural equivalence is very important during translating process, then discusses its concepts and ranks. Afterwards, the thesis discusses the difficulties and feasibilities of cultural equivalence and points out that a large number of difficulties would appear because of cultural gaps and cultural lost, but the close relationship between culture and words, and its common points as well as the active responses of the readers offer various possibilities and feasibilities in achieving cultural equivalence.Chapter four is the focus of this thesis. In order to examine how and to what extent cultural equivalence can be achieved during the course of translating culturally-loaded words, this paper expensively discusses the methods to translate the culturally-loaded words.Conclusion is the review and summary of the thesis, and it is concluded that in most cases, cultural equivalence can be obtained in translating, but sometimes only partial equivalence or no equivalence at all because of certain cultural barrier. In addition, translators should use domestication and foreignization flexibly so as to achieve as much cultural equivalence as possible. Then this paper emphasizes that it is still a painstaking and time-taking task to achieve cultural equivalence in translation.