Studv On The Thinking Process And Selection Of Translation Strategies Of Chinese Traditional Cultural Elements

The studies on translation process serve as the effective ways to discover the complex mental activities in human's brain and disclose the mystery in "black box" in translating.At present,the Belt and Road Initiative is vigorously promoted by China and the overseas promotion of Chinese traditional culture plays an important role in developing the Belt and Road Initiative.In view of this,by selecting the culture-specific items of the Chinese garden as research materials,the research aims to explore the translators' thinking process and selection of translation strategies when they are translating Chinese traditional cultural elements and investigate translators' mental activities and similarities and differences of translation strategies selection between translators of different majors.This study is instructive to the translators' translation practice,which is beneficial to the transmission of Chinese culture and the improvement of our country's soft power.And the study also has some implications for translation learning and translation teaching.This study is an empirical study on translation process.By selecting five postgraduate students majoring in English and five postgraduate students who are not English majors and utilizing Think-Aloud Protocols(TAPs),it aims to discover ten subjects' thinking process and their selection of translation strategies when they are translating culture-specific items of the Chinese garden.It is found that S15(Comprehension),S31(Self-monitoring),S25(Decide the priority of translation at syntactic level and semantic level),S9(Spontaneous association(Brainstorming)),S!9(Propose a preliminary solution)and S16(Equivalents translation)enjoy the highest frequency of use by ten subjects while S28(Back translate),S7(Break off translation and start over),S12(Make extralinguistic judgment)and S14(Recontextualize)are not employed by the subjects in this experiment.Besides,there are four new strategies found in this study,that is,S36(Words addition),S37(Difficulties evasion),S38(Words paraphrase)and S39(Whole text analysis).The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the application of these strategies and the subjects' motivations of choosing them is carried out in this empirical study.At the same time,the similarities and differences of the application of certain strategies between English majors and non-English majors are also elaborated in this thesis.It is revealed that there are similarities on the application of S15(Comprehension),S19(Propose a preliminary solution)and S25(Decide the priority of translation at syntactic level and semantic level)while there are differences on the application of S9(Spontaneous association(Brainstorming)),S20(Repetition for understanding)and S31(Self-monitoring).Based on the interviews with the subjects,the similarities and differences on strategies applied by English majors and non-English majors are discussed and the subjects' motivations of selecting certain strategies are investigated.Meanwhile,the mental activities of the subjects in their translation process are thoroughly explored.