An Insight Into Translation Of Tibetan-Featured Culture-Loaded Words

Chen Ai Luo Ding, as a classical representative masterpiece of Tibetan writer A Lai, describing the Tibetan religion, behaviors, culture, geomorphology and so on, bears profound Tibetan-culture images and is abundant in Tibetan-featured culture-loaded words. Language is the carrier of culture, and this novel saturated with Tibetan-featured unique linguistic expressions and customs has gained a wide readership and great reputation in the West. Thus, the translation of Tibetan-featured culture-loaded words in the novel plays an important role in the representation of the Tibetan-featured cultural objects.Chen Ai Luo Ding, co-translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin, has received many positive comments in Western countries. However, the English version has not been available in mainland China and the research on the English version is rare. Probably no research has ever been conducted systematically in terms of Tibetan-featured culture-loaded words. Hence in this research, studies on how to deal with Tibetan-featured culture-loaded words in Chinese-English translation will be conducted within the theoretical framework of Peter Newmark’s translation theory so as to examine the situation of cross-cultural communication. What’s more, this research, based on the classification of culture by Nida, aims to explore that the application of linguistic strategics and communicative strategies into the translation of five types of Tibetan-featured culture-loaded words(ecological, material, social, religious and linguistic) by building a bilingual database of these words, then attempts to find out how the translator deals with the translation of these specific words or expressions.The major findings of the research can be summarized as follows:(1)There are 263 Tibetan-featured culture-loaded words(T-F CLWs) in Chinese-English bilingual parallel database which can be classified into five categories: social culture-loaded words(SCLWs), linguistic culture-loaded words(LCLWs), religious culture-loaded words(RCLWs), material culture-loaded words(MCLWs) and ecological culture-loaded words(ECLWs), in which social ones accounts for 82 cases---counting for the largest proportion---and the rest is 66, 48, 35 and 32 respectively. The reason why social and linguistic ones occupy the larger proportion is that A Lai, as a Tibetan writer who writes in Chinese, on the one hand, is deeply affected by the Tibetan social culture, on the other hand, it proves that A Lai is a language master, who can flexibly use proper words to indicate special meanings;(2) After detailed analysis and discussion, conclusions are reached that the translators mainly adopted three kinds of translation strategies in rendering Tibetan-featured culture-loaded words, namely semantic translation, communicative translation and “correlative approaches” which orients to communicative translation with semantic translation as a necessary supplement to it.(3) Tibetan-featured culture-loaded words in different categories often determine show the distinctive translating pattern for the cultural uniqueness or the sharing extent between the source language and the target language, and the translator’s intention affects a lot their choices of strategies. The purpose of this thesis is to provide a new angle of research on the English translation of Tibetan-featured culture-loaded, thus having some practical and realistic values in promoting the spreading of China’s national minority culture in the world.