Unavoidability Of Redundancy In Translation Of Chinese Folk Customs(CFC)

With the rapid development of economic globalization, cultural exchange among countries is accordingly getting more frequent. In recent years, China also devotes itself to external-propagating Chinese traditional culture. Chinese folk customs, being typical of Chinese culture, additionally decorates the country with brilliant radiance. Nevertheless, the translation of Chinese folk customs has been left far behind the development of China’s external-oriented translation and introduction, the reason for which is that, first, many culture-loaded words in Chinese have added difficulties in translation; second, as a consequence, not a few redundancies unavoidably exist in such a translation in order to explain clearly the SL cultural connotations, thus causing not a small problem in TL readers’acceptability; what’s more, the Chinese traditional culture, due to its peripheral position for long in the West culture system, is still hard to take a central position in the world culture system.In spite of all these mentioned above, the translation of CFC still witnesses a great progress by a good job done by many dedicated Chinese translators in recent years. In order to bridge the communication between China and other countries, specialized introductions, expositions and external propaganda materials concerning CFC have sprung up like mushrooms. All the achievements reassure us a lot. Close to the translation of CFC, we can very often find many redundancies caused by cultural compensation for those culture-loaded words. Such redundant information in the translation is essentially good for target readers’understandability; but, at the same time, hinders the TL readers’reading interests due to its redundant style. In this case, this thesis tries to explore whether or not such a redundancy is unavoidable in translation and what effective means we can take in China’s external-oriented translation and introduction.In view of the specialty of translation of CFC, this thesis mainly focuses on the redundancy just in language expressions caused by cultural compensation for the defaulted cultural information. As is known to all, cultural default is commonly caused when the writer and the intended readers share the same cultural background information for its value at pragmatic and aesthetic level. However, it may create a big hinder for readers from different cultures to understand. Therefore, it is very essential for a translator to do something necessary for a cultural compensation for the TL readers’better understanding. In view of this, the concept of cultural compensation is very applicable to C-E translation of CFC due to its abundant culture-loaded words, which forms the main source of redundancy.Based on the materials published on China’s External-oriented-propaganda Websites, this thesis focuses on the study of redundancy in translation of CFC by an approach of the application of theory to practice. It first illustrates the text functions of the CFC, the translation strategy orientation, the redundant phenomena caused by foreignization, manifestation as well as its positive and negative effects, pointing out that the redundancy in translation of CFC is unavoidable in light of the cultural compensation by stating its positive effects. Second, the author reaffirms that, after probing into the causes and the positive effects of redundancy in translation of CFC, the redundancy in such a translation is unavoidable in order to achieve the purpose of diffusing Chinese culture. At last, some specific methods applicable to translation of CFC are suggested by the author to deal properly with the redundancies.