A Study On Chinese Culturally-Loaded Words Translation From Susan Bassnett’s Cultural Translation Theory-Take English Version Of BIG Breasts & Wide Hips As Example

In recent years, more and more scholars around the world pay much attention to the cultural translation. People in different countries want to know about the culture of other countries. However, culturally-loaded words have been the obstacles to international cultural exchange. Hence culturally-loaded words translation is of great importance to a better cultural communication. Chinese culturally-loaded words are words which are highly linked with unique Chinese culture and in fact their translation is still far from satisfactory because of the lack of guidance by theory.With the rapid development of cross-cultural communication, the focus of translation studies has shifted their attention from pure linguistic perspective to cultural perspective. Thus started cultural translation studies and it entered a totally different perspective after 1980 s. Among all the scholars, Susan Basenett is the most outstanding one. She puts forward that translation is the communication within culture or between cultures but not a pure linguistic activity. She also holds the view that translation equivalence should be the cultural equivalence between the source text and the target text. Along with the development of the cultural translation theory, many scholars have applied it to other fields and made great achievement. Therefore, in order to probe the culturally-loaded words more profoundly, the paper intends to take the book Big Breasts & Wide Hips as the research object and study it from the perspective of Susan Basenett’s cultural translation theory. Through the research on Goldblatt’s translation, the author tries to conclude some suggestions for the translation of culturally-loaded words so as to improve the quality of their translation in the future.The thesis is divided into six parts. Chapter one briefly introduces the research background, the significance of the research and the thesis structure. Chapter two is a literature review about the previous studies on Big Breasts & Wide Hips and its translator Howard Goldblatt as well as the translation of culturally-loaded words. Chapter three elaborates the theoretical framework, that is Susan Basenett’s cultural translation theory. Chapter four is about the basic information of Chinese culturally-loaded words, consisting of the definition, classification and characteristics. Chapter five makes a detailed case study of the culturally-loaded words from Susan Basenett’s cultural translation theory. The last chapter concludes the results of the thesis and puts forward some suggestions for further research.