Back Translation Techniques Of Culture-specific Words In Two Chinese Versions Of Moment In Peking

The novel Moment in Peking is a worldwide famous work and its writer LinYutang is a household scholar in China. However, lots of people have no idea about thefact that the book is written by Lin in English, and today the Chinese versions that weread are actually translated from English. As is known, the story in the book is a classicChinese one, and Lin’s writing purpose is to introduce Chinese culture to Westerners, sotypical Chinese culture can be easily found in the book. Inevitably, many of the culturalelements experience a translating process from Chinese into English, and in Chineseversions, they are translated back from English, which makes a special translationphenomenon called back translation. So far the studies on back translation at home andabroad are not complete, and more attention should be paid on this topic. This thesistries to study what techniques are employed to the cultural words in back translationprocess, and it also introduces the concept of high back translation degree to check theback translation quality. Hopefully, the study will bring some inspiration to the backtranslation study.Culture-specific words refer to the words that particularly developed and existed ina certain culture; they come into form during the long history process and reflect thespecial lifestyle of the certain nation. They are distinct representatives of culture.Studying culture-specific words instead of the broad culture will make the statisticsmore objective, so as to enhance the accuracy of the study.This thesis takes the novel Moment in Peking as an example to explore backtranslation techniques; it develops with qualitative and quantitative analysis. To makethe study more objective, the writer collects all the culture-specific words from the firstfour chapters of each volume in Moment in Peking, and finds their correspondingChinese versions of Yu Fei and Zhang Zhenyu with the help of Shaoxing UniversityBilingual Parallel Corpora. Based on Nida’s categorization of cultural elements, theseculture-specific words are classified into four categories and their back translationtechniques are marked. Then the thesis gives a quantitative analysis to show how thetwo translators deal with the culture-specific words based on the frequency of each backtranslation technique they use; Furthermore, the thesis tries to check whether the twotranslators achieve high degree of back translation by comparing these back translationswith the original culture. Results of the statistics and analysis show that the most frequently used techniquesby the translators are literal translation, replacement and transliteration, and differentcategories of culture-specific words tend to adopt different techniques due to thedifferent components. What’s more, the two translators adopt the same techniques formost situations, and the differences are minor, and mostly the culture-specific wordscome back to the original culture appropriately and achieve high degree of backtranslation.