On The Application Of Zero Translation To The Translation Of Distinctive Wuxia Culture In Chinese Martial Arts Fiction

Martial Arts fiction, as an indispensable part of Chinese literary works, boasts rich and colorful Chinese culture, showing Westerners a splendid and fantastic wuxia world.It is not inferior to any other Chinese literary works since it contains various cultural elements such as heroes, customs, clothing, historical events which all sparked a trend of learning Chinese and following Chinese culture. Nevertheless, how to render distinctive wuxia culture which is embodied in various cultural elements and how to promote this culture to the English world are two issues heatedly discussed in translation field.Since typical wuxia culture in Martial Arts fiction is the toughest section in translation, translators have to apply various translation strategies to render those distinctive cultural items so as to convey the surface meaning as well as the culture.Similarly, John Minford employed diversified translation strategies in The Deer and The Cauldron, such as Literal Translation, Liberal Translation, Rewriting, which had been studied by previous researchers while no one explored it from the perspective of Zero Translation, a new angle of translation theory and strategy. Besides, in terms of studies on Zero Translation, nobody tried to employ it to render a literary work let alone a Marital Arts fiction. Due to the shortcomings of previous studies, this thesis, on the basis of previous studies, employed Zero Translation to analyze John Minford’s The Deer and The Cauldron in detail. This thesis aims at answering three questions: Can Zero Translation be utilized to render wuxia culture? What is the extent of Zero Translation’s application to cultural elements? What is the function of Zero Translation in translating wuxia culture?Through micro-exploration on the translation of typical wuxia words, names of heroes, schools of Martial Arts as well as Chinese weaponry, the author of thesis probed into the application of Relative Zero Translation and the possibility of employing Absolute Zero Translation into the translation of certain cultural elements. Collectingtranslation examples and analyzing corresponding translations enabled the author of this thesis to find out that John Minford mainly employed Relative Zero Translation to render names of heroes, schools of Martial Arts. What’s more, John Minford didn’t employ Absolute Zero Translation, which, through analysis, is appropriate to render fighting arts and Chinese weaponry especially in categorizing these cultural elements and assisting target readers to tell the difference among differentiated cultural elements in this fiction. Finally, the function of Zero Translation is an assistance for both translators and target readers.This thesis, from the perspective of Zero Translation, probed into the detailed translation examples, providing other researchers with a new angle of studying Chinese Martial Arts fiction and offering alternatives to translators in rendering Chinese Martial Arts fiction, especially wuxia culture embodied in numerous wuxia items. In this regard,this thesis is bound to advance the promotion of wuxia culture to the English world actively and effectively.