A Comparative Study On The Translation Of Proper Nouns In Different Editions Of "Wolf Totem"

Languages an instrument for communication, and the carrier of culture. Proper noun is the most meaningful world in all languages, it’s the name of a specific person, place, or thing. Translation is a kind of cross-cultural communication, if the proper nouns translated un properly, it will influence the effect of cross-cultural transmission. In this paper, author use the theory of cross-cultural transmission and translation theory, to compact the proper noun’s translation in Wolf Totem. Author analyzed it from four version translation of Wolf Totem. This paper consists of three parts, such as preface, main text, and summary. In the preface, author explained the basis for subject-choice(selected topic basis), research object, research dynamic, the relation between translation and cross-cultural transmission, the definition of proper noun, and it’s species. In chapter one, author analyzed the translation states by text analysis and statistics method. In chapter two, author use comparison method to give analysis to different version of Wolf Totem translation. In chapter three, by the methods of literature, induction integration, and enumeration, author proposed the diversified translation way.There are 117 proper nouns appeared in different versions of Wolf Totem, including 64 kinds of personal names,46 types of place names and 7 kinds of nicknames. They have different translation theories and methods, including transliteration, word translation, free translation, literal translation, domesticating method and foreignizing method. There are some suggestions for translating proper names.1. The combination of domestication and foreignization:for external publicity of source language culture, the domestication should be used.2. The combination of transliteration and word translation:for languages like Chinese which translate Mongolian proper nouns in un phonetic words, the transliteration method should be used. For languages like English which translate Mongolian proper nouns in phonetic words, the word translation should be used.3.Liberal translation and literal translation:the source language and target language have common in proper nouns’translation, so the literal translation should be used. And there is no cultural words in target language, so the liberal translation should be used.too. 4.Sum up proper nouns translation Wolf totem different versions of the same place,find the person’s name in Cyrillic,Chinese and Japanese version is given priority to with transliteration,in me Mongolian version is given priority to literal translation,there are both transliteration words in the English translation.Place name translation in both of the (?)黑龙江 黄河.长江free translation into黑石头山.天鹅湖.内�'�古.(?) also has the (?)北京.云南place names,such as the (?).Wu Zhu Mu Qin,etc.Nickname translation,Mongolian,Chinese version to use liberal translation, English and Japanese translation along the Chinese version use transliteration method.5.different translation methods should be used for different kind of proper nouns. For translation of man is phonetic writing language,the transliteration should be used, but for un phonetic writing language,the transliteration should used;for specifically part of place name,transliteration should be used;for some of place names which have obvious cultural meanings,the transliteration should be used.