| Based on the two classical Chinese translations of Shui Tiantong’s and CaoMinglun’s, the thesis makes a study on translation strategies of culture-loaded wordsand expressions in Bacon’s The Essays from the perspective of Nida’s functionalequivalence theory. According to Nida’s FET, the thesis summarizes that the majortranslation strategies used in The Essays are: strategy of literal translation, freetranslation, transliteration, annotation and adjustment. And the annotation is alwaysaccompanied by literal translation, free translation and transliteration so as to makefurther explanatory and supplementary contents. Adjustment mainly refers torearrangement of word order and integration and enrichment of sentence structure. Atthis point, this thesis argues that these several translation strategies do sometimes notindependently exist in two translators’ translations. To the opposite, the translator willmake these strategies complement each other in separate translations. The use of suchkinds of translation strategies has practical guiding function for the translator to createa better translation.Translation is not simply referring to semantic level, but also referring to thetranslation of cultural level. As we know that there are a great number of theoriesrelated to translation. The theoretical basis of this thesis is Nida’s “dynamicequivalence” theory, which was put forward in his book Toward A Science ofTranslating in1964and later it develops into “functional equivalence” theory as forfurther enhancement in the mid-1980s. Nida’s functional equivalence theory (dynamicequivalence theory) considers that “translation is to transfer the meaning of sourcetext into target text with the most natural and closet equivalence.”(Nida&Taber,2004:12) He considers that the key point of translation should be shifted from form toreader’s response and puts reader-oriented as translation’s starting point and also takesreader’s response into account as a judging factor to comment a translation’s qualityand he highlights the concept of “function”. In Nida’s words, cultural translationindicates “a translation in which the content of the message is changed to conform to the receptor culture in some way, and/or in which information is introduced which isnot linguistically implicating the original; opposed to linguistic translation”.(Nida,2004:199) The interpretation of cultural translation in Fang Mengzhi’s A Dictionaryof Translation Studies in China is “to focus on the accurate convey of culturalconnotation or is even based on the re-explanation of local cultural angle of view”.(Fang Mengzhi,2011:305)Culture-loaded words and expressions refer to some language phenomena orcultural terms lying in the source text. Because of the difference in historicalbackground, social custom, religious belief and ideology, readers can not find theequivalent language or relevant vocabulary with national characteristics in targetlanguage. These words reflect a certain nation’s unique activity accumulated in thelong historical course. Culture-loaded words are related to a wide range of aspects,including idioms, proverbs, religious words, allusions and fables and material words,such words of everyday expressions. The famous American the Bible translator andtranslation theorist Eugene Nida divides culture into five sorts. This thesis classifiesculture-loaded terms into five categories according to Nida’s five categorization ofculture and they are ecological culture-loaded terms, material culture-loaded terms,social culture-loaded terms, religious culture-loaded terms and linguisticculture-loaded terms.The study focus of the thesis is mainly the contents expressed in chapter four,which are the analysis of how the two translators deal with the culture-loaded terms inBacon’s The Essays and the translation strategies they adopted towards these terms.According to Nida’s FET, readers can learn from these strategies to better taste theexceptional cultural connotations loaded by these terms when they are interpretingBacon’s The Essays. |
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