Strategies For Translating Chinese Cultural Texts

This thesis first introduces ethnic minority culture profile translation and adaptationtheory. Then, space is devoted to the presentation of the main difficulties encounteredwhen translating the profiles of ethnic minority marriage customs in Customs of EthnicMinorities, including great differences in linguistic structures and cultural loss. To bespecific, the source language is more loosely structured than the target one as it valuescovert coherence and parataxis. In addition, the source text features many culture-loadedwords, making it difficult to achieve complete equivalence. Finally, based on adaptationtheory, the thesis attempts to suggest some workable strategies from two perspectives,namely linguistic structures and cultural contexts. In dealing with linguistic structures,specific strategies such as topic-subject conversion and hypotaxis-parataxis conversion areproposed so as to render the linguistic structures of the translated text better adapted tothose of the target language. When it comes to cultural contexts, translation plusannotation, free translation and explanatory translation are applied to overcome differencesand to compensate for cultural loss. In conclusion, idiomatic ways of saying things in thetarget language should be taken into consideration and cultural blind spots should beavoided in translating texts of similar type.