Translating Culture-specific Terms In Talk About Chinese Culture With Foreign Friends:a Frame Semantics Perspective

This is a report on the translation project Talk About Chinese Culture with Foreigners. Analysis of the translation difficulties in the project reveals that cultural defaults give rise to the lack of cognitive frames in readers’ minds, which possesses a great challenge for translation. In light of the significance of culture-specific terms in the spreading of culture, this paper, under the guidance of the frame theory, studies approaches to the translation of culture-specific terms in the book Talk About Chinese Culture with Foreigners. It put forwards three modes to construct cognitive frames for culture-specific terms, including intra-textual mode, extra-textual mode and the combination of the two modes. In addition, taking textual trait into consideration, this paper tries to apply various translation techniques together so as to realize a multi-dimensional translation. Finally, taking readers’ response as the yardstick, this paper concludes feasible translation approaches towards culture-specific terms from a cognitive perspective and hopes to offset the imperfection that one single-dimensional translating model has in translating culture-specific terms.