On English Translation Of Culture-specific Items In Wen-hsin Tiao-lung From The Perspective Of The Memetic Theory

Liu Xie’s corpus Wen-hsin tiao-lung is the greatest treatise in Chinese literary theory and criticism, which gets highly attention and evaluation in each dynasty and thus occupies an important status in the academic development.Since the sinologist and Oxford Professor Ernest Richard Hughes first translated part of Wen-hsin tiao-lung into English in 1951, many scholars started to translate it and made continuous researches on it. Up to now, there have appeared eight different English versions of Wen-hsin tiao-lung. However, researches on the important classic Wen-hsin tiao-lung still focus on the literary thought and theories as well as its academic origins, the study on the English translation of it is relatively poor, let alone the study on the English translation of the culture-specific items which carry cultural characteristics.For compensation, this paper adopts the memetic theory, a new cultural transmission theory based on the theory of evolution to explain the law of cultural evolution, to study the English translation of culture-specific items in Wen-hsin tiao-lung. This paper includes five parts. The first part is a brief introduction to the research background, significance and methodology, etc. The second part introduces Wen-hsin tiao-lung and its author as well as studies on Wen-hsin tiao-lung and the culture-specific items in it and also the studies on the memetic theory both at home and abroad. The third part introduces the memetic theory, including the definition of memes, the criteria of successful memes and the transmission process and transmission ways of memes as well as the relationship between the memetic theory and translation. The forth part is the most important part of this paper, which discusses the English translation of culture-specific items in Wen-hsin tiao-lung by taking Stephen Owen’s excerpts of Wen-hsin tiao-lung as a case study based on the memetic theory and also summarizes the leading translation strategies employed by Stephen Owen in translating the culture-specific items in Wen-hsin tiao-lung under the two different ways of memetic genotype transmission and memetic phenotype transmission. The last part is the conclusion of this paper. Under comparative analysis and discussions of vast examples in previous parts, this paper finds out that Wen-hsin tiao-lung is a large meme pool and the culture-specific items in it fit the criteria of successful memes, so they themselves are strong and successful memes; like other memes, the culture-specific item memes in Wen-hsin tiao-lung also pass the four stages, i.e. assimilation, retention, expression and transmission during translation, and they also take the way of memetic genotype transmission and memetic phenotype transmission, with memetic genotype transmission as the main way. Based on the different ways of transmission, this paper concludes the various leading translation strategies employed by Stephen Owen in the hope that it will be helpful to the English translation practice of Wen-hsin tiao-lung and other Chinese classics, thus pushing forward the spread of Chinese culture to the world.