A Study On Translation Of The Chinese Culture-loaded Words From The Perspective Of Cultural Context: Problems And Methods

With the increasingly strengthened influences of Chinese culture, the whole worldis attracted by Chinese traditional culture, especially Confucius culture, as well asChinese traditional arts, food, folk custom and Chinese people’s view on relationsbetween human and nature. In cultural communication, language serves as a leadingrole in cultural expansion and transmission, which provides great opportunities andchallenges to translation studies. Chinese culture-loaded word, just as its name implies,has linked Chinese culture and the language together, the translation of which is ofgreat significance to Chinese cultural transmission. Owing to the fact thatculture-related words are born from and closely related to the cultural context, thestudy of the status quo of culture-loaded words in translation and its translationstrategies based on cultural context theory in cultural communication promises greatsignificances too.Based on the theory of cultural context and under the guidance of Materialism,this thesis has adopted a problem-posing, problem-analyzing and problem-solvingmethod for the purpose of providing a relatively clear and prospective research area intranslation of culture-loaded words. The author has first analyzed the translationproblems of culture-loaded words carefully according to the five factors in culturalcontext put forward by Halliday that influence the judgment of the translators mostnamely thinking mode, social cultural background, values, social-psychological factorsand geographical and historical traditions. Then the translation problems have beensolved and translation strategies have been summarized through a study on translationof culture-loaded words in Zhang Peiji’s Selected Modern Chinese Essays.Through the analysis, four translation problems of the culture-loaded words havebeen found in surface-structure and deep-structure cultural context, respectivelyambiguity caused by different thinking mode, which comprises concrete and abstract,synthesizing and analyzing, subjective and objective and forward and reverse;misunderstanding manifested in different social cultural backgrounds, which arecomposed of the educational system, kinship, social network and so on;misinterpretation caused by the mismatch of social-psychological factors, which couldbe further divided into native flavor damage caused by the interference of differentvalues and untranslatability caused by the interference of aesthetic preference;following next by meaning loss caused by the mismatch of geographic and historicaltradition. By analyzing the translation methods adopted by Zhang Peiji in translating the cultural words in his version, the author has summarized the strategies employedby Zhang including transliteration, literal translation, explanation, annotation etc. Thusthe three research questions have been answered with the integration of theory andpractice.Due to the time and space limitation and the divergence of the criteria ofclassification, this thesis is lacking in an overall review of the theories and haslimitations in the selection and classification of cultural words. A more integrated andextended method is called for in future studies on relationship between the theory ofcontext and the translation of culture-loaded words.