A Study Of Translating The Chinese Word Of ’Fu’ On The Perspective Of Cultural Functional Equivalence Theory

The Chinese auspicious ‘Fu’ culture is a comprehensive expression of traditionalChinese culture. It reflects the Chinese from the royal families and nobles to thecommon people longing and seeking for a better life. As influenced by the culture, theChinese word of ‘Fu’ and its expressions have myriads of changes. While inspreading the Chinese cultural expressions to the world, problems from the culturedifferences are the obstacles in translating it from Chinese into English.This thesis uses Susan Bassnett’s Cultural Functional Equivalence Theory as itstheoretical framework. Bassnett argues that, translation is not a pure languagebehavior, it roots in the cultures. Translation is the communication betweeninter-culture and intra-culture, and translation should concentrate on the functionalequivalence of the source culture with the target culture.The cultural-specific meanings of ‘Fu’ are more complicated than people thoughtand lots of Chinese words with associative meanings with ‘Fu’ exist in the translationversions, so these expressions with the meaning of the Chinese word of ‘Fu’ are hardto translate. Therefore, if we can find out the appropriate translation methods, theeffective intercultural communication can be achieved, and an empirical investigationand analysis of target readers’ acceptability of the existing English versions to findnon-equivalent factors and reasons is necessary. As for this, there are three questionsshould be answered:1) Are there any cultural-specific meanings of the Chinese wordof ‘Fu’ that English native speaker can not accept?2) What principle or methodshould be taken into the account by the translator so as to achieve the equivalencewhile translating the words or expressions with the cultural specific meaning?3)Whydo English native speakers misunderstand and can not accept the existing Englishtranslation expressions with the cultural-specific meanings of the Chinese word of‘Fu’?The whole thesis consists of six chapters：Chapter One is the introduction, in thischapter are the sections detailed the purpose, the historical background, thesignificance, the scope of the thesis. Chapter two is the literature review, in the first part of it, the writer brief introduced the Chinese ‘Fu’ culture and its cultural-specificmeanings, and present studies on the Chinese word of ‘Fu’, its cultural expressionsand translations. In the second part of this chapter, the author mainly introduced theRelationship among culture, language and translation and the background of SusanBassnett and cultural turn, together with the development of cultural functionalequivalence theory and the debates on foreignization and domestication. Chapter threecontains the research design, research questions, subjects, materials and procedures.The results and analyzing of the questionnaire was discussed in Chapter Four. InChapter Five, the writer discussed the findings and the hypotheses based on the resultsof the questionnaire. Chapter Six is the last, it is the conclusion of the research.As the findings from the research, the differences in understanding thecultural-specific meanings of the Chinese word of ‘Fu’ by the English native speakermostly stayed at the cultural level, and the problems at the linguistics level arecomparatively less, also the more acceptable translation versions of this specific wordis the ones through domestication. And the findings of this paper can be used as thecontributions to intercultural communication via the right way to express the Chineseword of ‘Fu’ and its cultural value as well.