Culturally-loaded Words In Chinese Translations Of The Kite Runner:A Perspective Of Translator’’s Subjectivity

Traditional translation studies, mainly source-text oriented, has made the translator in a state of “invisibility”. With the advancement of translation studies, the status of translator has been improved greatly.Translator’s subjectivity has become an important topic in translation studies.The Kite Runner, a debut written by the Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini, has won great attention and popularity since its publication. The novel is set in Afghanistan at the end of last century,telling the story of friendship between Amir and his servant, Hassan. It describes the particular culture, customs, religious and the people’s life in war from the point of first-person narration. It has been translated into 42 languages up to now, showing extraordinary influence to the literary work.Cross-cultural communication, as a result of the on-going process of globalization, has become an essential part in people’s daily life.However, the culturally-loaded words involved in this novel have been shown to be among the difficulties that translators have to face.This thesis examines how the culturally-loaded words in the novel are managed in the two available Chinese versions from the perspective of translator’s subjectivity. It proves that different translators adopt different translation methods to the same work. Their subjectivity indeed have an influence on what methods they will use to realize the translation purpose, but they will also be influenced by ideology, poetics, universe of discourse and language.