Transparency Of Cultural Term Translation And Translator’s Mediation——a Case Study Of Shi Ji (the Grand Scribe’s Records) By W. H. Nienhauser Jr.

The Grand Scribe’s Records, a great Chinese classical work, contains a lot of terms with abundant cultural connotation. The quality of text translation depends on the term translation. The choice of translation strategy relies on the translator’s tendency to the translation principles.Walter Benjamin illustrated transparency as:for pursuing the fidelity of each word, a translation should let the original shine upon by a literal rendering of the syntax. Lawrence Venuti advocated the transparent translation can be realized only by respecting otherness of the target culture. Taking Walter Benjamin’s transparency theory and Lawrence Venuti’s transparent strategy as a theory framework and also taking the readers’acceptability into account, this thesis tries to analyze the cultural term translation strategies of The Grand Scribe’s Record translated by W.H.Nienhauser Jr by classifying cultural terms into certain categories.Based on Peter Newmark and Eugene A. Nida’s classification to words and previous studies on words classification, this thesis classifies the cultural terms in The Grand Scribe’s Records into seven categories, including natural phenomenon; significant historical figure names; material names; official titles; music, rites, poetry and scholarship; religion and tribute, punishment and reward.The tentative conclusion is that for achieving the transparent translation, a translator needs to choose different translation strategies according to different term classifications to make the translated text more readable.