A Study On Translation Strategies Of Culture-Specific Items In George Kao's Version Of Look Homeward,Angel

According to cultural translation theory,translation should take culture as the unit rather than be confined into linguistic scope.The translator must not only fully analyze the cultural meaning of the source text,but also consider how to transform the cultural meaning into the target text,respecting the cultural norms of both the target language and the source text.Cultures bear commonness of human civilizations,but what they reflect more are the diversities and differences which are intensively shown as culture-specific items(CSIs).Most of previous studies of CSIs are based on theoretical discussions with a few examples as a supplement.Therefore,more researches based on the text are needed to verify the applicability and systematicness of those theories.Aixelá's theory on CSIs is based on three Spanish translations of an English text.His descriptive research provides a new perspective for translation studies of CSIs.According to Aixelá's theory of translation norms and Zhang Nanfeng's amending suggestions,this thesis tries to explore Chinese translation of English CSIs,describes the translation strategies adopted by the translator in actual translation activities,and further analyzes reasons and summarizes the translation style of George Kao.According to Aixelá's definition of CSIs,the thesis selects 290 CSIs in Look Homeward,Angel and their corresponding expressions in George Kao's translation.Based on Aixelá's and Nida's standards of classification,the author classifies them into five categories,that is,material culture,social culture,linguistic culture,historical culture and religious culture.The author makes statistical analysis on the translation strategies and methods specific to different categories and adopts the descriptive approach to make case analyses on the translation phenomena of CSIs,then explains the strategic choices made by the translator and summarizes rules.The study finds that in implementing foreignization and domestication strategies,George Kao adopts ten kinds of translation methods and skills in total,that is,repetition+extratextual gloss,transliteration+extratextual gloss,transliteration+intratextual gloss,linguistic translation,linguistic translation + extratextual gloss,linguistic translation +intratextual gloss,absolute universalization,naturalization,deletion and autonomous creation,among which the former six belong to foreignization and the latter four belong to domestication.In the translation process,the translator George Kao conveys the cultural connotation of the source language to target readers in different degrees of foreignization and domestication respectively.The translator does not regularly employ one strategy to deal with a certain kind of CSIs but puts the demands of target readers first and gives full consideration to the development and correlation within contexts.That is to say,in dealing with the same category of CSIs the translator adopts various translation strategies.In the same way,one translation strategy may be used to deal with various kinds of CSIs.The rich diversity of Kao's translation highlights the readability of popular texts and reflects their feature of wide audience.From this,we can see the unique translation style of George Kao.