Empirical Study On Intercultural Communication Effectiveness Of The Chinese-English Traditional Blessing Expressions

Chinese traditional blessing expressions as the products of the long and richtraditional Chinese culture have been playing an important role from the old time ofChina up to now. They include contents of the policy, economy, culture and otheraspects. The language features of the Chinese traditional blessing expressions embodyneat formation, profound implied meanings and an abundant traditional culture flavor.In daily life, these blessing expressions are used to express people’s good wishes forthe peaceful, prosperous, happy，and long life as well. There are five categories of theChinese traditional blessings: the Fu, the Lu, the Shou, the Xi, and the Cai. AnAmerican scholar, W. Aihabode said:"The culture of Chinese auspicious could besymbol dictionary of the Chinese people, it is an invisible symbol hidden in life andthought of Chinese people." With the fast economic development of China, more andmore foreigners are paying closer attention to the Chinese culture, especially to theChinese traditional culture. Therefore, in order to make Chinese traditional culturebetter known to the world, the research on the methods of translating Chinese intoEnglish is important. However, the way to make translation reach bettercommunication effectiveness during the intercultural communication is the vital one.So far, the studies on the Chinese traditional blessing expressions are not much doneat present. The studies of analyzing translation methods and the comparing differenttranslation methods can be found but not much of the research on the influencingfactors on the translation methods and communication effectiveness have beenmentioned. This thesis will be focus on finding out the influencing factors oncommunication effectiveness of the Chinese traditional blessing expressions. Thedetail study on translation methods should be done in order to look out the appropriatetranslation methods for better communication effectiveness.In the research, thirty-eight typical Chinese-English Chinese traditional blessingexpressions were collected through the published books, dictionary and internet. Aself-designed questionnaire “Survey of Communication Effectiveness of the Chinese Traditional Blessings” was made according to research purpose. The forty participantswere the native English speakers from the United States. The purpose of the study wasto test the acceptable degree of Chinese-English Chinese traditional blessingexpressions translated with different methods, to find out the influencing factors oncommunication effectiveness and to find out the better translation methods to reachbetter communication effectiveness.The results of this study can be concluded as the followings: Firstly, acceptabilityof Chinese traditional blessing expressions was positive for communication. Secondly,after the deep analysis, the researcher found out those influencing factors onChinese-English Chinese traditional blessing expressions were cultural factors whichreferred to ideology and culture gap. In addition, certain linguistic differences alsoinfluenced the communication effectiveness of the Chinese-English Chinesetraditional blessing expressions. Finally, the participants considered that theannotation was the best way in translating them and the semantic translation could beapplied more. However, the participants were able to accept transliteration in the test.Generally speaking, the correlative translations of the Chinese traditional blessingexpression can involve many factors from culture to language. In order to reach thebetter communication effectiveness of Chinese traditional blessing expressions,translators and researchers have more study to go on, as it is a hard and endless task.After all, the researcher of this paper hopes that the foundings of the thesis can behelpful for the future translations of the Chinese traditional blessing expressions inorder to achieve much better communication effectiveness and can be a reference toanyone who is going to do further research in the field.