| Language is the carrier of culture. Culture-loaded terms in particular reflect thepeculiar culture of a language community. Translation is not so much a decoding andencoding process between natural languages as a communication of differentcultures carried by these different languages. Therefore, translation of culture-loadedterms is of great significance. Nida (1993) claims that “for truly successfultranslating, biculturalism is even more important than bilingualism, since words onlyhave meanings in terms of the cultures in which they function”(p.110). Many atranslation theory has been applied to translation of culture-loaded words andrelevant translation strategies have also been put foward. However, there still lacks aguiding principle of translating culture-loaded terms. Relevance translation theory,proposed by Gutt, serves as a unified and reasonable theoretical framework fortranslation studies. It provides a new perspective and guiding principle for thetranslation of culture-specific items. In the framework of relevance translation theory,translation activity is a dual ostensive-inferential process involving three parties:source writers, translators and target audiences. Translators in this process arehearers as well as communicators. Optimal relevance should be what the translatorpursues and the criterion to evaluate a target version. On the basis of relevancetranslation theory and related studies, this thesis, by establishing a parallel database,tries to explore and analyze the translation strategies employed by Ku Hungming andWaley in their translation of culture-loaded terms in Lun Yu. By doing so, this thesisaims to emphasize the role of optimal relevance as the guiding principle intranslating culture-loaded words and summarize appropriate translation methods fordifferent kinds of culture words, in hope of making some aspirations and guidelinesfor the translation of culture-loaded words. |
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