Target Culture And The Translation Of Culture-specific Items

Translation is a social activity, which is rooted in the source culture and constrained by the targetculture. Therefore, viewing it against the broader sociocultural context and seeking the various culturenorms behind the translator’s decision-making are necessary to better understand the translationactivity. Chinese classics are crystallization of traditional Chinese thinking and culture, includingplenty of culture-loaded items, whose translation will exert far-reaching historical and practicalinfluence in introducing Chinese culture to the whole world, and promoting cultural exchangesbetween China and foreign countries. Compared with the translation practice of Chinese classics, theirrelevant study still lags behind, with few specialized researches based on modern linguistic andtranslation theories, and the existing studies still need to be improved at their systematic andtheoretical levels.Presently, many scholars at home and abroad have already explored the issue of Culture-specificItems (CSIs) translation. However, most of them only enumerate several examples. Few systematicresearches have been made on CSIs translation based on large continuous texts. In this situation, theemergence of Descriptive Translation Studies in the1970s affords a new perspective of studying CSIstranslation. This thesis takes the norm theory in Toury’s Descriptive Translation Studies as thetheoretical framework and combines the methods of qualitative and quantitative researches toinvestigate CSIs translation in texts. Strategies of CSIs translation and the impact of target culturenorms (TCNs) on the translator will be explored, on the basis of which general principles of CSIstranslation are summarized.In this thesis, Aixelá’s definition of CSIs and Newmark’s classification of five types of culturesare employed to identify CSIs and their categorization. Then nine chapters are selected randomly fromthe Chinese classic Xiyouji and their corresponding parts of the English version by Jenner. The CSIsand their corresponding English expressions in the nine chapters are taken as data and examples forresearch. Ratios of each translation strategies adopted in CSIs translation are acquired through statisticanalysis as well as the extent to which the translator is constrained by TCNs. Then, some rules andtendencies of CSIs translation are generalized, and TCNs are explored to explain the translator’sstrategy selection.Through statistic and empirical analysis, the following findings are made:1) linguistic (non-cultural) translation accounts for a high percentage in the practice of CSIs translation, especiallyin translating proper nouns;2) in conforming to the TCNs, the translator often resorts to fourstrategies, that is, intratextual gloss, free translation, absolute translation and naturalization;3) thetranslator is constrained by TCNs to some extent, while the constraint is not absolute, and thetranslator’s subjective factors also play a significant role;4) TCNs should be viewed in an objectiveway so that both their constraining and directive functions should be realized.