On The Translation Of Culture-specific Items In Shi Xiaojing’s Camel Xiangzi From The Cultural Translation Perspective

Translation, regarded as a social activity, is a means to interpret works from thesource language to the target one and spread one culture to another. It could hardlybreak away from these cultural constraints. The increasing influence of culturalstudies on translation studies has given birth to the cultural turn of translation studies.Such a turn of the research focus of translation from language and text analysis to therelationship between translation and culture has broadened the research scope oftranslation studies. Besides, translation is a process of making choices ranging fromselecting materials to the translation method of a single word. Therefore, it isnecessary to view translation against a broader context to seek the conditioningfactors of the translator’s choice is necessary for a better understanding of thedecision-making process.Scholars at home and abroad have paid much of their attention to the translation ofculture-specific items, but most of them only enumerate several examples. It still hasmuch room for further studies at scientific and systematic levels.This thesis selects Luotuo Xiangzi which contains numerous culture-specific itemsrelated to Chinese flavour and particularly Beijing customs and studies translation methods the translator adopts in her Camel Xiangzi.Three hundred and ninety-three culture-specific items are selected from theoriginal novel Luotuo Xiangzi and the translated text Camel Xiangzi and this thesisdivides them firstly into proper nouns and common expressions. Nida’s classificationof five subcultures is taken as a reference to further categorize the above two groups.These culture-specific items and their corresponding English expressions are thesource of data analysis and discussion. Based on ratios of translation methods and themajor translation strategy that the translator employs, this thesis adopts some conceptsof cultural translation studies to explore conditioning factors of translation choices soas to provide reasonable explanations for the translator’s decision.Through the qualitative and quantitative research, following findings are made.Firstly, in translating culture-specific items in Luotuo Xiangzi, transliteration, absoluteuniversalization and intratextual explanation are translation methods of the highestratios. Secondly, domestication is the major translation strategy, accounting for58.2%.Thirdly, the major translation strategy of proper nouns and that of common expressionsdiffer significantly with91.0%of proper nouns adopting foreignization and78.6%ofcommon expressions domestication. Fourthly, cultural factors such as the state ofpolitics and economy, translation norms in the target culture, target readers andideology summarized from cultural translation studies are major constraints on thetranslator’s choice of translation methods and strategies when translatingculture-specific items from Chinese to English.