Aixela’ S Strategies For Translating Culture-Specific Items In Chinese-English Translation:Applicability And Modification

Culture-specific items (CSIs) are undoubtedly one of the most obvious culture-related issues in translating. In1996, Javier Franco Aixela, a Spanish translator, defined the concept of "culture-specific items" and grouped11strategies from a lesser to a greater degree of intercultural manipulation for translating CSIs by observing three translated versions into Spanish from the English detective fiction The Maltese Falcon. At the same time, he established four variables that may impel a translator to choose certain strategies.In translating some chapters of_the history of the Ming and Qing dynasties in the book "The History of China" from Chinese to English, the author of this paper applied Aixela’s strategies to deal with CSIs in the text and confirmed that the theory, if slightly modified, could be generally applicable in Chinese-English translation; the author, however, also noticed two aspects that eluded Aixela’s observation:firstly, certain items from the source text actually had its origin from a third culture other than the source-language (herein referred to Chinese) culture or the target-language (herein referred to Chinese) culture that had been melded with the source-language culture (herein chiefly referred to the Manchurian culture and also to some Chinese local religious cultures that had foreign origins); secondly, certain items from a third culture actually had its origin from the source-language, yet changes occurred when they were back-translated into the source-language years later and became established expressions in the source-language. To deal with the above-mentioned two aspects, the author proposed two new strategies, i.e., the employment of existing corresponding expressions in the target language to render third-culture items and an integrated approach (the afore-mentioned first strategy plus intratextual gloss plus extratextual gloss) and one existing strategy, i.e., absolute universalization that had already been put forward by Aixela.