A Contrastive Study Of The C-E Translation Of Nahan: A Perspective Of Culture-specific Items

Language is the carrier of culture; owing to the disparity of cultures in different countries, specific words must be loaded with distinctive cultures. Culture-specific Items(CSIs) are those carrying specific cultural connotations. Readers can understand foreign cultures by learning CSIs. Since the rapid development of cultural communication, how to transmit the CSIs is becoming one of the key-points and difficulties of translation studies. Lu Xun's Nahan is the first collection of colloquial short stories. There are various cultural elements which reflect the unique culture of China at that time. The translation of CSIs in this book is one of the key-points and difficulties if we want to introduce cultural elements in this book to western readers. Scholars in many countries have come up with various translation strategies of CSIs, among which Aixelá's eleven translation strategies is relatively comprehensive.The thesis takes Aixelá's summary of Culture-specific Items as the analysis framework, and classifies CSIs in Nahan into two categories including seven subcategories: proper nouns(conventional proper nouns and loaded proper names) and common expressions(CSIs related to ecological culture, material culture, social culture, religious culture and linguistic culture). It proceeds to make a contrastive study of Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang and Julia Lovell's translation of Nahan with the purpose of finding out the differences of their translation strategies of CSIs. Based on examples and analyses, this thesis finds out that in terms of the translation of CSIs in Nahan, Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang have adopted six translation strategies of Aixelá's eleven translation strategies, in which linguistic(non-cultural) translation, one of the strategy of conservation, was used the most, while Julia Lovell has adopted eight strategies of Aixelá's eleven translation strategies, in which absolute universalization, one of the strategy of substitution, was used the most.