On The Translation Of Culture-loaded Lexemes In Eileen Chang’s Self-Translated The Golden Cangue From The Perspective Of Peter Newmark’s Translation Theory

As Newmark (2001) observes during the cultural communication,"translation is one of the most important and economical methods". Translation has become an important method for Chinese culture "to go out". Chinese culture-loaded word, as its name implies, has linked the Chinese culture and its language together, the translation of which is of great significance to Chinese cultural exchanges. Thus the adoption of an appropriate and effective translation strategy is extremely important there. The communicative translation and semantic translation put forward by Newmark provide a new approach to analyzing and studying the translation of culture-loaded lexemes. The semantic translation emphasizes the original author and communicative translation focuses on the target readers. It also presents the idea that the translation strategies varied according to the different text type. The translator will decide to choose semantic translation or communicative translation according to different requirements, the target reader’s features and text types for achieving a favorable translation.This paper makes a tentative study on the translation of culture-loaded lexemes in The Golden Cangue in the perspective of Newmark’s communicative and semantic translation theory and his classification of culture-loaded lexemes. First, the author analyzes culture-loaded lexemes from five categories, namely:social culture-loaded lexemes, religious culture-loaded lexemes, ecological culture-loaded lexemes and linguistic culture-loaded lexemes. Second, she studies the communicative and semantic translation of culture-loaded lexemes. And finally, she analyzes the statistics of each type of culture-loaded lexemes and Eileen Chang’s translation strategies.Through the classifications, analyses and statistics of culture-loaded lexemes, the author finds that Eileen Chang has adopted communicative translation when translating some parts of the culture-loaded lexemes in the hope to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained by the readers of the original. Comparatively, she has adopted more semantic translation strategies aiming at preserving the original semantic and syntactic structure of culture-loaded lexemes, making the translated culture-loaded lexemes maintain clear and distinctive feature and spirit of the original culture in the target language. This paper makes a further study on Eileen Chang’s attitude towards Chinese culture and the reasons for her communicative and semantic translation strategies. On the one hand, Eileen Chang intends to rise the foreign readers’interests by employing semantic translation; on the other hand, she wants more to hold the posture of the Oriental culture in the western literary community in the hope of introducing the traditional Chinese culture to English speaking countries and expecting it to be well accepted there.