A Research On The Translation Strategies Of Culture-Specific Items In Children's Literature

Children's literature plays a significant role in the psychological growth of children;and children can benefit from a good children's work in many aspects.Recently three decades,some of the classic children's literary works are increasingly introduced to China from foreign countries;gradually,studies on the translation of foreign children's literature translation begin to thrive.The translation of literary works involves cultural factors;how to translate cultural factors in works is an important issue for translators.At present,the study of domestic children's literature translation on culture-specific items is still rare.Based on the Theory of Culture-Specific Item proposed by Aixelá,the author selects the Diary of a Wimpy Kid as the case study.Through researching,this paper aims to explore the translation strategies of culture-specific items in children's literary work.In the course of the study,the author resorts to statistical analysis and comparative analysis to explore the translation strategies of culture-specific items in children's works.Afterwards,constraining factors affecting the translation strategies for rendering CSIs will be summarized.By comparing two translation versions,the author proposes the optimal translation strategy for the culture-specific items and makes rational explanation for using the strategy.The major findings are as follows:(1)In the Diary of a Wimpy Kid,the factors influencing the translation strategies of the culture-specific items are mainly language and cultural factors,translation purpose and target readers.(2)Based on the using frequency,the translation strategies adopted to rendering culture-specific items in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid are transliteration,linguistic translation,extra-textual gloss,adaptation,limited universalization,absolute universalization,autonomous creation and recognized translation.(3)Different culture-specific items should be treated with different translation strategies.This study also found that culture-specific items are divided into proper nouns and common expressions.When dealing with proper nouns,linguistic translation,extra-texual gloss and adaptation are used more frequently than the rest,whereas when translating the common expressions,linguistic translation,extra-texual gloss and absolute universalization are dominant methods.In general,the frequency of using foreignation is higher than that of domestication,which suggests that the translator of children's literature tends to spread foreign culture and exotic customs to targeted young readers.