Translation Strategies Of Culturally-loaded Words In The Travels Of Lao Ts’an

With the development of cultural globalization, culture and translation are connected more and more closely. Since Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere put forward the cultural turn in translation studies in the early1990s, cultural translation has got more and more concerns. Although the status of Chinese culture is more valued gradually, it is still in a weak position compared with western culture in the process of globalization. In order to retain the features and identity of Chinese culture, how to translate the cultural factors in Chinese classics under the context of cultural translation has become the hot focus.Venuti’s advocacy of foreignization aims at urging translators and target language readers to reflect on the violence of translation and hence to seek to recognize the linguistic and cultural differences between the source language text and the target language text. To preserve the cultural identity of China in the age of globalization, it’s the best choice to apply Venuti’s translation theory in translating Chinese classics such as The Travels of Lao Ts’an.The Travels of Lao Ts’an is honored as one of the four condemnation novels in the late Qing Dynasty by Lu Xun. It is highly commended for its high artistic taste especially its scenery description and characterization. This thesis tries to apply Venuti’s translation theory to analyze various samples comparatively in two English versions, aiming at providing a new perspective for the appreciation study of translation of Chinese classics.This study differs from previous researches on the English versions of The Travels of Lao Ts’an in the following ways. First of all, it tries to make evaluative comparison of examples selected from two English versions and make exhaustive comparative analyses from the perspective of cultural translation; secondly, under the guidance of the cultural translation, as for the English translation of Chinese classics, the translator should take various translation strategies to represent the source language culture to the maximum extent in order to recreate and realize the equivalence of different cultures, which requires a translator to use foreignization to deal with cultural factors in translation as much as possible. When necessary, try to employ "China English" not "Chinglish" properly to translate the works with profound cultural connotation.