| In recent years, cultural translation has attracted great attention from scholars around the world. As a tough nut to crack in transferring Chinese culture, culture-loaded words deserve our attentions and analysis. To enrich the translation methods of culture-loaded words, the author made a case study with the book Big Breasts and Wide Hips as the research subject. This book is a masterpiece of Moyan, the winner of the Nobel Literature Prize in2012. Owing to the successful translation by Howard Goldblatt, the west readers get to know things about Moyan and the Chinese cultural elements that embodied in the book. As the translator of the novel, Howard Goldblatt translated lots of Chinese folk sayings, proverbs, and epigrams, which are all typical culture-loaded elements.Translation is a purposeful activity of human beings. Some German scholars put forth Skopos theory in the late20th Century. Unlike traditional translation theories that only perceive the source text (ST) as information provider and the criterion to evaluate the quality of translation, Skopos theory instructs translators to select the information intentionally to fulfill the translation purpose and meet the target readers’needs. Within the framework of the theory, equivalence, an outdated translation criterion, is replaced by adequacy (Snell-Hornby,2001). As known to all, there are three rules under the Skopos theory, namely, Skopos rule, coherence rule, and fidelity rule. The coherence rule requires that the TT should be adequately coherent to the ST so as to make sense in communication, and enable the readers to understand the translation. Fidelity rule requires an intertextual consistency between the ST and the TT. Actually, intra-textual coherence is superordinate to intertextual coherence, and both of them are inferior to the Skopos rule. Therefore, the Skopos rule ranks first, and it requires that the choice of translation method should be determined by and serve for a particular purpose. Vermeer reckoned that a good translation should enable the TT to function in a given situation under the wish of the people who use it.(Vermeer,2000)Then what is the Skopos or purpose for Howard Goldblatt to translate Big Breasts and Wide Hips? From the translator’s experiences and speeches on translation study that mentioned in the paper we can get the answer. The general purpose for Howard Goldblatt to translate the culture-loaded words is to transmit Chinese culture to the West, and his communicative purpose is to inform western readers of Chinese culture in detail. Bearing this Skopos in mind, for the sake of keeping the original flavor of Chinese culture, Goldblatt chose transliteration and literal translation as the primary translation strategies to overcome culture barriers and make appropriate adjustments in translation. Meanwhile, for the better understandings of the target readers, other strategies like free translation, substitution, amplification and simplification, and omission were also adopted by him to meet the acceptability and aesthetic concepts of western readers. With Big Breasts and Wide Hips getting popularity in the west, it is possible to say that Goldblatt’s translation is adequate and successful. His translation also contributed a lot to the cross-culture communication between China and western countries.Inspired by the previous scholars’studies, the author of this paper is to conduct a study on Howard Goldblatt’s translation of the culture-loaded words in Big Breasts and Wide Hips, and endeavors to make discoveries in the following three ways: Firstly, the author will give a specific classification of all the culture-loaded words in Big Breasts and Wide Hips and their English expressions. Secondly, the author will make a detailed case study to expound the translation methods used by the translator to render these culture-loaded words. Finally, the author finds out two blemishes of Goldblatt’s comprehension of the culture-loaded words in this book. The author hopes that the research will be able to strengthen the cultural awareness among translators. Through the study, the author attempts to provide some useful suggestions for the future study of the translation of culture-loaded words in other literary works, and may also help target readers overcome some culture barriers.This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One makes a general introduction to the whole thesis, stating the research background, introducing the objectives and significance of the study, and listing the overall structure of this thesis. With the amazing speed of globalization, different cultural elements attract more and more attentions from scholars who are involved in communication field, especially from translators. Since cultural elements have ever been the continuous difficulty in the translation process, it is necessary to seek for a proper method and have it examined to render the translation of culture-loaded words and expressions.Chapter Two moves on to have a literature review. Firstly, the author will explain what is culture, and the relationship between culture, language and translation. Then this chapter will concentrate on previous studies of the translation of culture-loaded words, giving a detailed explanation of culture-loaded words, including their definitions, the difficulties of translating them and the common mistakes that should be avoided when translating them.Chapter Three will pursue the Skopos theory by interpreting its definition in the beginning. Then it will give an outline of the theory’s nature, setting out the core concepts of it, namely, Skopos, brief of translation, loyalty and adequacy. The rest part of the chapter will explain the main idea of and the relationship between the three basic rules of Skopos theory:Skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule. Finally, this chapter will provide distinctive merits of Skopos theory.Chapter Four is devoted to demonstrate the research questions of this study, explaining the process of research design, stating how the data in this thesis is collected. This research mainly applies qualitative method by practicing a case study, and all examples and data are collected from the book Big Breasts and Wide Hips.Chapter Five concentrates on the study of translating culture-loaded words with reference to Nida’s classifications of cultural elements. It starts out from the categories of culture-loaded words in Big Breasts and Wide Hips. The author made five tables to expressly list all Chinese culture-loaded words in the book and their corresponding translation. Then, on the basis of Goldblatt’s experiences and relative lectures he made, the author attempts to figure out the purpose for him to translate the novel, and exemplifies the application of translation strategies under the three rules of the Skopos theory respectively in Big Breasts and Wide Hips. At the end of this chapter, the author also supplements two shortcomings of Goldblatt’s translation. This chapter attempts to put forth a tentative guiding principle governing the translation of Chinese culture-loaded words.Chapter Six is the conclusion of the paper, in which a brief summary is made, limitations existed in the research process are mentioned, and some feasible suggestions on this translation issue for further research are provided. |
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