On E-C Translation Of Culture-Specific Items

Translation involves not only language transformation but also culture transmission. Given the significance of cultural elements in translation, studies on culture-specific item, a key factor, bear both theoretical and practical importance.Unlike previous studies, which mainly focus on selection of literal or free translation, foreignization or domestication approach, this thesis intends to describe translation strategies and explanatory variables in an objective manner so as to shed new light on English-to-Chinese translation of culture-specific items.The present paper aims at making a comprehensive and systematic survey on English culture-specific items. Under the framework of Spanish scholar Javier Franco Aixela’s taxonomy on CSIs, the author takes five books, namely The Go-Getter, Reject Me! I Love It!, Who Stole My Sale?, What Choice Do I Have?, Time and Money2Live Your Dream rendered by the author herself and her supervisor as a databank, in an attempt to analyze the translation strategies they chose including conservation (transference, transliteration, linguistic translation, extratextual gloss and intratextual gloss) as well as substitution (repetition to avoid synonymy, limited universalization, absolute universalization, naturalization, attenuation, deletion and autonomous creation), and explore a range of underlying factors that affect their selections (supratextual parameter, textual parameter, the nature of the CSI and intratextual parameter). In this way, significant referential suggestions could be brought up for translators and scholars in the future.The thesis falls into five chapters in all. Chapter one probes into the objectives, significance, questions and organization of the research paper. Chapter two clarifies the relationship between culture and translation and offers an overview of the culture-specific items, ranging from its definitions, classifications, existing researches to possible translation strategies. The third chapter, also the main body of this thesis, gives a panoramic view of the five books rendered by the author and her supervisor, analyzes translation strategies on CSIs they adopted, and at last modifies Aixela’s taxonomy in accordance with typical features of English-to-Chinese translation. In the fourth chapter, the author discusses constraints affecting the choice of translation methods. The study concludes with chapter five, in which the author points out that despite the completeness and rationality of Aixela’s taxonomy on CSIs, its corpus is based on English-to-Spanish renderings of The Maltese Falcon. So when it comes to English-to-Chinese transference, this framework is in need of modification and quantitative survey.