A Study Of The Translation Of The Transformers' Names In Chinese Mainland And Hong Kong Under The Influence Of Target Culture

This thesis is a descriptive comparative study of the Chinese translated versions of the Transformers' names.Unlike personal names in the real world,the Transformers' names are fictional names heavily loaded with cultural implications that are not so easy to convert into Chinese because there are no existing standard versions for reference.Also,as both Chinese mainland and Hong Kong are rich in history and culture,and though they belong to one China,they are different in many ways.Thus when foreign names like the English Transformers' names came to these regions,they were translated according to the respective cultural,particularly,linguistic habits instead of one single cultural or linguistic prescriptive norm.Therefore,the author intends to describe and analyze the similarities and differences between the translated versions in Chinese mainland and Hong Kong of the Transformers' names,specifically,those in the first animated series and the first Transformer film in the franchise in the 1980 s and their first translated versions in these two regions,not from the perspective of quality assessment but from the perspective of target culture in the aspects of ecology,material culture,social culture,religious culture and linguistic culture which could be further classified as phonological,morphological,syntactic and lexical factors according to Eugene A.Nida's classification of culture.This study applies Nida's classification as basic theoretical structure with Ke Ping's classification of culture as reference to enrich the details of the structure.After comparative analysis of the ninety-four selected samples,it is found that besides twelve identical translated names,the two translated versions share five translated methods: 1.Translated completely according to the meaning of the original;2.Translated partly according to the meaning of the original and expressed domestically;3.Translated according to the implication of the original;4.Translated according to the alternate mode of the Transformer;5.Translated according to the features of the Transformer.The reason behind such similarity is that they both follow to different degrees the translation principles “faithfulness,expressiveness and elegance” put forward by Yan Fu.Their major differences lie in five aspects: 1.The naming as traditional Chinese nicknames for heroes and villains in the Chinese mainland version is systematic while that in Hong Kong isn't;2.There is next to zero transliteration in the Chinese mainland version while about one third of the translated names in the Hong Kong version are transliterated as a person's name;3.The domestication in the Chinese mainland version is higher than that in the Hong Kong version;4.Some translated names for the same Transformer are different because they are designated differently in Chinese mainland and Hong Kong;5.The Chinese mainland version has cultural taboos concerning education for children while the Hong Kong version applies provocative characters for naming to attract the target readers' attention.The approach to the study of the translation of the Transformers' names may be applied also in the study of other linguistic phenomena in the domain of subculture like the fictional names in other fantasy materials,for example,the superheroes' names in comic books and their film adaptations.