The Fate Of Culture-marked Source Text In Target Text

In2012, Literature Nobel Prize awarding and Mo Yan’s attitudes towards the significance of his award, namely it proves no impact of Chinese culture or literature in the world except his personal works, draw public attention and remind the limited dissemination of Chinese culture and literature, which is the key question waiting to be solved after this research. From the aspect of literature, updated, wide-ranged corpus of translated works which are introduced by foreign and especially inland translating practice will support Chinese cultural communication. Since receptors outside China have access to Chinese literature conveniently, they will be influenced by cultural elements in it.In translated works, it is critical to rightfully process culture-marked elements in source text along the cause of spreading authentic Chinese culture. However, many culture-marked source texts are still misunderstood and misinterpreted in target text despite the good development direction of Chinese culture. This wrongly fate of culture-marked source texts greatly impedes Chinese cultural dissemination. Thus its mistreatment needs to be brought to justice and be corrected under the witness of scholars and translators. Moreover, research about culture-marked source texts can serve as a reference for future translation practice.Through Mo Yan’s Chinese novel The Garlic Ballads (《天堂è'œè–¹ä¹‹æ­Œã€‹), which has its complexity in language form, and its one and only translation work by Howard Goldblatt’s, this paper studies three prominent aspects of culture-marked source texts: dialect, missing concept or referent, and connotation. These three aspects reflect an overall system for culture-marked source texts, which includes form and meaning of lexeme. From the view of each aspect, disputable translation samples and instructive models are analyzed for improving the target text while researching translation strategies from Chapter three to chapter five.The First Chapter of this article mainly introduces the motivation of choosing culture-marked source language as the research object and Mo Yan’s novel as the text. It also describes the research methods and innovations of this paper. The Second Chapter summarizes the definition and research status of culture mark word. The writing,. language style of Mo Yan’s novel and comments on Howard’s translation works are also introduced. In the theoretical background, Eugene’s Functional equivalence theory, and the development of domestication and foreignization at home and abroad are summarized. The Third Chapter mainly investigates dialect translation. In Mo Yan’s The Garlic Ballads, dialect is highlighted, as one form of culture-mark source texts. Dialect is the key factor in local cultural expression, which has its difficulty in the translation. Usually, it will be ignored and mistranslated in the translation process because of its special form. Eugene Nida’s functional equivalence is brought up as a guiding role in dialect translation. The goal is to make receptors can understand and appreciate the form of dialects as well as the Chinese receptors do from original works. After the case analysis, this paper summarizes that dialect translation need to pay attention to three key factors.The Fourth Chapter discusses a missing concept or referent which does not exist in the target language. If there is missing information in target language, the readers will have incomplete or wrong cognitions of the cultural in source text. In this case, the untranslatability will hinder the spread of the source language culture. This paper advocates the foreignization translation strategy in processing missing concept or referent. In the use of foreignization strategy, compensation methods such as notes and explanation are also used, which can help English receptors to have full understanding of concepts or referents in the cultureThe Fifth Chapter analyzes how to recreate the connotative meaning from culture-marked source text into the target language. Connotations are rooted in the context, which includes idioms, slang, proverbs and so on. Due to the influence of mother tongue, the translator and the reader from target language society is likely misunderstand cultural connotation meaning from the source language. Translators who are from the source language society might be bounded because of the native language acquisition, or language form. They tend to ignore the expression equivalent connotations from the target language. Therefore, translators should compare the influences on English receptors by using foreignization and domestication strategy, and select the suitable one based on the principle of functional equivalence.To deal with culture-marked source texts, there are effective strategies like foreignization and domestication, which can help to achieve equivalence with the aid of compensating means like notes, rhetoric etc. Between two strategies, foreignization is highlighted in dealing with three aspects of the culture-marked source text and keeping cultural elements in the target text. Meanwhile, balance between domestication and foreignization is also proved to be critical and practical for translation of connotation.For preparing translation competence, one needs the combination of language knowledge, translation strategies, detailed compensating means, and good balance between strategies, which can only be polished by translation practice and authentic text study. Afterwards, Righteous and mature cultural dissemination from literature approach can be achieved from translators’and scholars’dedication on rewriting a fair destiny for culture-marked source text.