English Translation Of The Geographical Terms In Luotuo Xiangzi

Since the cultural turn in translation studies, cultural translation has long been the focus in the academic circle both at home and abroad. Meanwhile, with the implementation of the ―going global‖ strategy of Chinese culture, the translation of classic literature in China begins to receive extensive attention around the world. Thus, it becomes rather essential to explore cultural translation to promote cultural dissemination by means of the English translation of Chinese classics. Against this background, this thesis selects the English translation of geographical terms in Luotuo Xiangzi and its effect on the cultural dissemination as the research object.Geographical terms or names account for a large part in proper names. Composed of specific and general terms, they contain referential meaning and etymological meaning. The author collects all of the geographical names from the novel Luotuo Xiangzi by careful reviewing of relevant literature and the novel itself, and then marks all those geographical terms in order and extracts them in the forms of both Microsoft Word and Excel for the sake of subsequent research. The number of geographical terms in Luotuo Xiangzi is 109 and they occur in the novel for 283 times in all.This thesis integrates related theories of Liu Miqing and Peter Newmark as the theoretical basis. The Chinese scholar Liu Miqing systematically proposes the cultural translation theory, promoting Chinese translation studies to a new theoretical level. He puts forward three major principles of cultural expression theory, that is, the cultural compatibility principle, scientific principle and aesthetic principle, which are of great significance to translation practice. Besides, the model of translation procedures proposed by Peter Newmark involves 12 procedures, namely, transcription, literal translation, through-translation, recognized translation, cultural equivalent, translation label, translation couplets, translation triplets, deletion, naturalization, acronyms and metaphor. This research combines the three principles of cultural expression theory with the model of Peter New Mark‘s translation procedures concerning the translation of proper names, which finally form an integrated theoretical framework for this research. The model of translation procedures is employed as the categorization framework of geographical terms, and the three principles of cultural expression theory as the fundamental framework to guide and evaluate the translation practice.According to the theoretical model, three major findings are obtained through analyzing the geographical terms in the four English versions of Luotuo Xiangzi:1) The translation procedures adopted in the English versions of Luotuo Xiangzi are transcription, literal translation, through-translation, cultural equivalent, translation couplets, translation triplets, deletion and naturalization. However, the other five translation procedures of proper names, as summarized by Newmark, are not adopted for the following two reasons. First, the research object in this thesis is selected from a literary work resulting in the inadequacy of the three translation procedures of recognized translation of administrative names, acronyms and translation label; Second, the form and meaning of Chinese geographical terms requires the distinction and accuracy of the translation of those terms. Thus, the two translation procedures of translation triplets and metaphor are not true with the geographical terms extracted from the novel Luotuo Xiangzi.2) The adoption of the translation procedures of transcription, literal translation, cultural equivalent and translation couplets is true with the three major principles of Liu Miqing‘s cultural expression theory, while those procedures of through-translation, naturalization and deletion are true with the principle of cultural compatibility along with the scientific principle;3) The selection of translation procedures of geographical terms is closely connected with the dissemination of culture carried by those terms. Only by adapting to the cultural development to effectively convey cultural information, the translation of geographical terms in Luotuo Xiangzi can accurately and elegantly disseminate the culture that geographical terms bear.This research selects geographical terms from the novel Luotuo Xiangzi as the research object, adding a new perspective to cultural translation and broadening the area of the research on the translation of classic literary works. Besides, this research contributes to the translation studies of Chinese geographical terms and cultural dissemination as well.