Survival,Extinction And Variation Of Memes In The Translation Of Culture Loaded Words

This thesis is mainly about the conditions of "memes", which are inter-culturally transmitted. The notion "meme" firstly appeared in Richard Dawkins’masterpiece The Selfish Gene. After Dawkins, numerous researchers devoted themselves into the study of memes and thus developed a new independent discipline---emetics.The scholars define and debate about memes in different ways and from different perspective of view. And with their ideas combined, memes can be safely defined as different types of information that are passed from one member of group to another by means of imitation. And that is where this paper is based, because translation is also a kind of imitation made by translators in cross cultural communication process.However, as is known, genes are not equally strong to survive the evolution selection; likewise, memes are not equally strong to survive the translation selection. In the process of translation, the most competitive memes can be well preserved, while the least ones will just extinct. Setting aside these two extremes, there are still partially survived memes, which lose only part of their elements, and the variant memes, which may change to adapt to the new cultural environment. Conclusively speaking, this thesis may discuss four kinds of memes: the fully preserved ones, the half-extinct ones, the extinct ones and the variant ones.In the culture-transmission process, culture-loaded words play a significant role. Because they are the presentation of history and culture that uniquely belongs to a specific nation or community. And that is why the author of this thesis chooses culture-loaded words as the research object, because there are a large number of memes embed themselves in culture-loaded words. The research text is Shui Hu Zhuan, which is one of the four Chinese masterpieces, and Shapiro’s translation The Outlaws of the Marsh. This version of translation is widely considered as a domesticated one, which is suitable for the research of memes in culture-loaded words.During the research, the author of this thesis may compare the Chinese and English of frequency culture-loaded words, and check the classics and dictionaries to confirm the survival situation of each word. Then, the author can classify and analyze those memes. And at last, the author will pick out the words or memes of the highest frequency to be analyzed.With this Memetics theory framework and the target text carefully researched, the author of the thesis tries to answer the following questions:Which situations of the four will happen to the memes that passed to another culture community by the way of translation? Will they gain their stable existence or just disappear? What causes the differences? What influence will the differences have on the source culture, the target culture and the cultural integration?After all the analyses and discussions, the author of the thesis concluded that each situation of the four may happen to memes in various kinds of words. But generally speaking, most memes in social tradition-related words tend to be fully preserved; most memes in history and legendary related words can partially survive; most Chinese character related words tend to extinct; and variation can happen to political system related words, measurement words and religious words.Memes can be fully preserved because of novelty, repetition, commonality, context-supporting and cultural value; memes can be only partially survived because of history, religious influence, mental culture, comprehensions of nature, the helplessness of translators; Memes extinct because of cultural exclusivity, high complexity and low practicality, and memes mutate because of vacancy of culture, resemblance of the source and target memes, and the consideration of the acceptability of target readers.For the source culture, the cross-cultural propagation of local memes may improve the cultural identity of the nation or community and furtherly be benifical to the heritage and development of its culture. For the target culture, numerous foreign memes continuously rushing into their community may let them know more about foreign countries. But, meanwhile, the inrush of foreign memes may create pressure for the propagation and heritage of their local memes. However, for the cultural integration, memes’cross cultural propagation may help to bridge certain gap between cultures, and thus the progress of cultural integration can be slightly promoted.