| Appellation, as an essential part in daily life, is deeply rooted in the traditional culture of each nation, and reflects corresponding cultural heritage and ideology of its people. As a result of different traditional cultures in the east and the west, there appear big differences in appellation between English and Chinese. Fictive kinship terms, as one of important part of Chinese addressing system, seem to be hard to find its exact equivalents in English system, which may cause difficulties in translating them. This paper tries to collect fictive kinship terms and their translations in the four English versions of Hongloumeng, and compare and analyze their translation strategies on the basis of Bassnett’s cultural translation. It has summarized the characteristics of each English version about the translation of fictive kinship terms, and has selected five of the most frequently occurring fictive kinship terms to compare and analyze.The study has shown that different from what they have done to kinship terms, when translating fictive kinship terms H&M is target-language-oriented and mainly takes domestication for better understanding and acceptance of the target readers, cultural substitution has been widely adopted; HBJ and Y&Y are source-language-oriented and tend to take foreignisation to maintain the linguistic and cultural features of Chinese fictive kinship terms, but domestication also has contributed a lot in their translations; as to BSB it has always adhered to be absolutely faithful to the source text and stuck rigidly to preserve the linguistic meaning and form of them. According to statistics, even in HBJ, BSB and Y&Y which are mostly source-language-oriented, cultural substitution still plays an important role to bridge cultural gaps in fictive kinship terms between English and Chinese. It could be said that Bassnett’s cultural translation is more or less applicable to the translation practice of fictive kinship terms. |
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