A Study On The English Translation Of Chinese Culture-loaded Words From The Perspective Of Frame Semantics

There is a "cultural turn" in translation studies in the twentieth century. This turn meanstranslation activities are no longer regarded as the simple transformation of language forms.Translation studies have more and more taken some social, political, cultural and translators’psychological factors behind language into account. Translation subject keeps developing inthe last century and constantly combines with some new language subjects among whichstudies from the perspective of cognitive linguistics especially the cognitive semantics havecaused more and more scholars’ attentions at home and abroad.Frame semantics put forward by the American cognitive linguist Fillmore in the1970sprovides people with a method of understanding and describing meanings of words andgrammar patterns. It is the new developing direction of cognitive linguistics. Frame semanticsitself is an interdisciplinary theory combined with linguistics, psychology, artificialintelligence etc. It is a linguistic cognitive theory which takes a comprehensive considerationof context, prototype, perception and individual experience.During the cultural transformation process between Chinese and English, it is inevitableto encounter with a lot of culture-loaded words which are the most active language units andthe most direct response of Chinese national culture. Culture-loaded words in Chinese arecountless because of the five-thousand years history and splendid culture of China. However,the huge differences between Chinese and western cultures have brought a lot of difficultiesand challenges for the translation of cultural-loaded words.Lu Xun is honored as the father of Chinese modern novels. There are lots ofculture-loaded words in his literary works which vividly reflect the features of semi-colonialand semi-feudal old China in politics, economy, material culture, religious belief, socialcustoms and habits, etc. It is the miniature society of old China. So in the translation of hisnovels it is very important to represent the meanings of the culture-loaded words correctly inthe source language. Only the correct translation of the cultural connotations of culture-loadedwords can make the readers in the target language totally understand the cultural connotationand then let more and more readers understand China and Chinese culture.Nowadays scholars at home and abroad have already done certain researches on bothframe semantics and culture-loaded words. But studies of the application of frame semanticson the translation of culture-loaded words are relatively rare. The author of this thesisattempts to discuss the feasibility of the application of frame semantics on the English translation of culture-loaded words in Chinese literary works through the qualitative analysisof the English translation of culture-loaded words in Lu Xun’s novels based on framesemantics and tries to propose the classification of culture-loaded words and then find thetranslation strategies based on frame semantics.