Translating Culture-specific Items:an Analysis Of The German Translation Of Yu Hua’ Novels

In the1970s, the Cultural Turn took place in Translation Studies. Translation is considered not only an exchange between two languages, but also a kind of cultural transfer. The recent research on the problem of literary translation is from interdisciplinary perspectives, such as under the aspect of intercultural German studies. With the rapid development of intercultural communication, how to translate cultural information, particularly culture-specific items to a foreign language, has become a focal point in Translation Studies.This thesis focuses on the translation of Chinese culture-specific items. The object of this paper is the German translation of Yu Hua’s novels. To Live, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant and Brothers are describe the fate of common people against the political and social enviromental changes in China and contain a lot of words and phrases with rich cultural meanings. Ulrich Kautz is a researcher who has a lot of practical experiences in the field of translation studies and teaching. He has an extensive knowledge of Chinese culture. As a translator, his translation of the culture-specific items in Yu Hua’s works are faithfully and flexible. That makes the critiques of Yu Hua’s works from the German media are almost all positive.In this paper, the author attempts to use the classification of the subculture made by Eugene A. Nida to categorize the Chinese culture-specific items in the three novels. This paper according to the eleven translation strategies by Javier Franco Aixela analyzes the representative examples of the German translations of the culture-specific items in Yu Hua’s works and makes statistics on the use of different strategies. In addition, the author compares the translation methods created by Ulrich Kautz with the translation strategies created by Aixela, and makes comments on the applicability of Aixela’s strategies to the research on the German translations of Yu Hua’s novels. Because of the limit of some special features of the language pair and of the primary literature, a few Aixela’s strategies could not be applied to the German translations of the Chinese culture-specific items. As Ulrich Kautz is a translator of Yu Hua’s works and his research influences his practice, some of his translation methods are be used often in the German translations of Yu Hua’s novels.Based on the above analysis, the research comes to the conclusion that, by these translations of the culture-specific items in Yu Hua’s novels Ulrich Kautz prefers to use the strategies of the category of substitution. Due to the large differences between Chinese and German cultures, Ulrich Kautz, in his translations, considers more about the reading habits and language habits of readers who are live in the target culture. He tries to make Yu Hua’s works close to the German recipients. The culture information of the three novels is well transmitted to the readers.The paper is an attempt at the research of the German translation of Chinese contemporary literature from a perspective of intercultural German Studies. The author hopes that this study may present some new perspectives to the further research on literary translation.