A Study On The Translation Strategies Of Culture-loaded Words In Lun Yu And The Complementarity Between Its Two English Versions

With the continuing globalization of information and communication, language and culture are being increasingly linked. Translation, as a kind of cultural communication, has been receiving more and more attention from translators at home and abroad. Translation is not only the conversion of language, but the transmission of culture as well. In the process of translation, cultural factors, always reflected in the culture-loaded terms, should be carefully taken into consideration such as religious culture, social culture, material culture and ecological culture. Here culture-loaded terms are considered as the most direct reflection of a nation’s history and its unique cultures. Since it is hard and even impossible to find corresponding words or expressions in the target language so as to fully demonstrate the connotations of the culture-loaded terms, translators need to select appropriate translation strategies to greatly achieve cross-cultural communication.Since the cultural exchange between China and the western world, Lun Yu has become one of the most classic works of Confucianism that has attracted world-wide attention. Furthermore, quite a few translated versions have been born with the efforts of translators at home and abroad. In the light of Nida’s classification of culture-loaded words and Chi Qingli’s classification of translation methods, the thesis aims to conduct a comparative and empirical study of the culture-loaded words in the two influential versions of Lun Yu translated by Arthur Waley and Gu Hongming. The translation strategy of foreignization is achieved mainly through literal and word-for-word and transliteration methods while domestication is generally achieved through substitution and interpretation methods. In the actual operating process, every specific translation method may take up different proportions; hence, the translated version will reflect different tendency of translation strategies. And Waley tends to adopt foreignization strategy while Gu prefers domestication strategy to translate culture-loaded terms. However, when translating material culture-loaded terms especially costume culture, both of them prefer literal translation method. The author finds in the study that domestication and foreignization are not quite opposite to each other and we can’t say which translation strategy is better than the other; instead, different translation strategy serves different target readers with different reading levels and different reading purposes. Therefore, the diversity of cultural translation strategies should be encouraged. Besides, the diversity of cultural translation strategies brings about the complementarity among multiple translated versions of the same original work in content and style. The different translated versions together promote the acceptance of the foreign concepts embedded by reinforcing those concepts with continuous modification and clarification so as to make our traditional culture understood and even accepted by the western world.