A Meanings And Acceptability Of Study Of Chinese Word Of ’shou’ In View Of Cultural Functional Equivalence

The Chinese word of ‘Shou’ is a cultural-loaded word with a history of more thantwo-thousand years, as well as having a hundred different writing forms. It is also oneof the most common used words in the daily life and within many social contexts allover China, meanwhile it contains the thinking of the Chinese people towards themeanings of life, the worship of life, the expectation of living longer, and theeternality of life over five thousand years within its denotative and connotativemeanings, and the cultural specific functions, the social functions and communicationvalues, it is a word with the meanings and functions far beyond the English word of"Longevity". Due to this, it is a hard translation word from the Chinese language intoEnglish, as it is easily to be mistranslated and cause questions to the English nativereaders.In fact, a word and the cultural concepts beneath it are inseparable, as thesmallest unit of a language, the meanings and cultural functions of a word are thereality of its culture. Meanwhile, translations are also directly affected by thestrategies applied. The current research shows that most of the researches on themeanings of the Chinese word ‘Shou’ are within the Chinese language and its culture,few research involved the lexical semantic translation in Chinese-English translation,cultural function equivalence, and the empirical study on the acceptability of thetranslations have been discussed.According to Susan Bassnett, the basic principles of translation lie in theequivalence of the cultural function, and the acceptability of target readers. In view ofher theory, the present research is conducted with the investigation of the Englishnative speakers, the various factors, such as the denotative and connotative meanings,the cultural specific concepts, the symbolic meanings of the word, and with theresearch methods of dictionaries study, literature study, questionnaire, comparation, and quantative research from the perspects of the cultural function and readers’acceptation in exploring the differences between the Chinese word of ‘Shou’ and theEnglish word of ‘Longevity’. Four areas were touched in the study:(1) Theequivalence in meanings of the Chinese word of ‘Shou’ and the English word of‘Longevity’ in two forms;(2) The cultural specific concepts of the Chinese word of‘Shou’;(3) The equivalence in the symbolic meanings between Chinese and English;(4) The acceptability of the Chinese and English translation of the word in threetranslation strategies.The findings of the research are:(1) Two denotative meanings of ‘life and longlife’ are equal between the Chinese word of ‘Shou’ and the English word of‘Longevity’;(2) The two denotative meanings of the Chinese word of ‘Shou’, such as‘Respectful and euphonium’ are beyond the English word of ‘Longevity’;(3) Theobvious differences in the cultural concepts of the Chinese word of ‘Shou’ and theEnglish word of ‘Longevity’ existed;(4) The symbolic meanings of the Chinese wordof ‘Shou’ hold its specification;(5) The translated texts with the wish-sentencestructure are more acceptable than the phrase;(6) The way of creative translationtends to be more acceptable then the others.The present research suggests that due to the historical development the of differentcultures in the inheritage of the significance of life，and the different perspectivesabout it, the missing are the causes of mistranslations, and the misunderstanding ofcultural functions of the Chinese word of ‘Shou’ from the English native speakers alsoexist. Therefore, the recognition of these differences of the Chinese word ‘Shou’ andthe English word of ‘Longevity’ in their meanings and functions at the levels of word,cultural specific concepts, symbols and translations, and the recognition of foreignerswho are the strangers of the Chinese culture do hold practical meanings in translatingthe Chinese word ‘Shou’ and such other culture-loaded words in the future.The thesis consists of six chapters: Chapter One is the introduction, concerningthe purpose, the historical background, the significance, the scope and the definitionof the relative terms of the research. Chapter Two is the literature review, demonstrating the differences of the Chinese word of ‘Shou’ and the English wordof ‘longevity’ in meanings from the dictionaries, and the relative publications, it statedprevious researches concerning the translation equivalence in linguistic andextra-linguistic contexts, the commonly used Chinese-English translation strategies,and the acceptability of them. Chapter Three demonstrated the present research design,including the plan, the hypotheses and goals, the materials, subjects, methods andprocedures. The results of the questionnaire and the analysis are discussed in ChapterFour. In Chapter Five, the author discussed the findings in semantic, cultural andsymbolic meanings and translation skills along with the results. Chapter Six explainedthe conclusion, limitation and suggestion of the research.All in all, it is the hope of the present study that through detecting the differences inmeanings of the Chinese word of ‘Shou’ at the lexical level, the problems in itstranslations to explore the differences in the connotative and denotative meanings, thedifferences in cultural functions and the causes in mistranslating such specific culturalwords, a contribution to a better translation of it can be made in the future translation.