English Translation Of Culture-loaded Words In Ma Weidu’s Blogs

When translating the blogs of Ma Weidu, a Chinese collector and writer, the author finds that those words with Chinese-characteristic are the main barrier of translation. Whether these words can be dealt with properly is of great significance to the quality of this translation. Based on the author’s translation practice, this paper probes into the related problems in translating these words, namely, the culture-loaded words.The cultural turn in translation studies motivates more and more scholars to observe translation from a cultural perspective and their ideas of translation turn from "the transference between two languages" to "the transference between two cultures". This turn, in translation practice, makes the translation of culture-loaded words a barrier which has to be overcome, and thus makes this research necessary. This paper mainly studies four problems:the definition, translatability, categories and translation methods of culture-loaded words.This paper first explores the definition of culture-loaded words, reviews the discussions around the academic circles about the translatability and untranslatability of culture-loaded words and comes up with a positive conclusion. By referring to the culture categories proposed by Peter Newmark, this paper divides culture-loaded words into five groups corresponding to the culture categories. This paper then gives an introduction to Ma Weidu and his blogs, as this paper is a case study on the translation of his blogs. And the culture-loaded words that appear in the author’s translation are classified accordingly under the category frame mentioned above. This paper then puts forward transliteration, transliteration plus annotation, literal translation, literal translation plus annotation and free translation as effective methods for translating culture-loaded words, which are well-illustrated and followed with specific case analyses.At the end of this paper, it summarizes the problems and achievements of this study, points out the limitations of this paper and makes suggestions for future studies.