On The Translation Of Religious Expressions In The Creation Of The Gods: A Sociosemiotic Approach

Creation of the Gods is one of the best Chinese mythical fictions. Based on the historical theme of the punishment of King Zhou by King Wu, the writer of the novel employs the religious culture and folk beliefs as artistic methods to scheme the whole story. Many immortals and gods are visualized through the description of the story, and thus the novel has a great contribution to the comprehension of Chinese folk culture. In this novel, the words, expressions or descriptions which reflect Chinese religious culture and folk beliefs should be classified as religious expressions, the correct translation of which is of vital importance in transferring the cultural meaning of the original.Sociosemiotics, known as an interdisciplinary theory, offers people a new perspective toward translation. According to sociosemiotics, language is one of the most complicated sign systems; translation and translation studies should be put into a wider sphere, in which not only should the linguistic aspect of language be considered, but also the non-linguistic aspects. Meanwhile, sociosemiotic approaches to translation regard translation as an interlingual and intercultural communication, of which the meaning and function constitute the invariant core. As a result, the application of sociosemiotic approaches to the study of the translation of religious expressions, which contain a lot of cultural information, is feasible and necessary.This thesis is an attempt to study the translation of religious expressions in Creation of the Gods from the sociosemiotic perspective with Morris'triadic division of semiotic meanings as the theoretical basis. It is constituted with five parts:the first part is an introduction to the research background, methodology, basic definition of semiotics, Creation of the Gods and its English version, and the last part is a conclusion drawn from the thesis. Besides the introduction and the conclusion, there are three chapters:Chapter one is a literature review in order to examine previous studies on the relevant objects; Chapter two mainly introduces the theoretical framework used in this thesis; Chapter three is a detailed analysis on the application of sociosemiotic approaches to the study of the translation of religious expressions in Creation of the Gods. In this chapter, examples are grouped and analyzed according to three semiotic meanings, namely, the referential meaning, the linguistic meaning and the pragmatic meaning. Through the analysis, it can be found that the referential meaning and the pragmatic meaning are closely related to each other in religious expressions in Creation of the Gods. The proper transfer of the referential meaning cannot be achieved without the correct comprehension of the pragmatic meaning. As to the translation of religious expressions in Creation of the Gods, Gu Zhizhong has done well in the transfer of the referential meaning and the pragmatic meaning by using various translation methods of literal translation, addition, adaptation and integration, etc. However, compared with the referential meaning and the pragmatic meaning, the linguistic meaning is the least translatable one among the three. The translator tries his best to keep the linguistic meaning of the original, although in many cases he has to preserve the pragmatic meaning and the referential meaning first. In general, Gu Zhizhong has achieved the goal of transferring the meaning and fulfilling the functions of the original text in the process of translating religious expressions in Creation of the Gods.