A Contrastive Study Of The Translation Of Cultural-specific Items From The Perspective Of Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics,as a scientific theory focusing on understanding and interpreting,shares the same research focus with translation studies.According to hermeneutics,any translation activity involves the understanding and interpreting of the source texts.As a key scholar who developed hermeneutics into its heyday,Gadamer proposed the three basic principles in his great book Truth and Method,namely,"historicity of understanding","fusion of horizons" and"effective history".The "cultural turn" in translation studies has driven many scholars to realize that translation is actually an intercultural activity,and the historical and cultural elements involved in the translation process have become the focus in many translation studies.The disparities between different cultures often bring about difficulties in intercultural communication and make the semiotic transformation between different languages to become difficult.The Spanish scholar Aixela came up with the concept of "cultural-specific item" in 1996,thus,how to deal with the cultural-specific item has gradually became a popular topic in translation studies.Lao She's Luotuo Xiangzi is a classic work of contemporary Chinese literature,which depicts the miserable life of a rickshaw puller named Xiang Zi.This novel reflects the darkness of old society in China and reveals the ruling class's oppression over people in the bottom of society.Lao She applied many expressions with distinctive Chinese features and Beijing local flavor,cultural-specific items can be easily found in this novel.Since the publication of Luotuo Xiangzi,it has enjoyed warm welcome by readers and was translated into different languages.By now,there are four English versions of Luotuo Xiangzi,from which Rickshaw Boy by an American translator-Evan King and Camel Xiangzi by a Chinese translator-Shi Xiaojing are chosen by this thesis.This thesis takes the three basic principles in Gadamer' s hermeneutics as the theoretical framework,selects cultural-specific items in Luotuo Xiangzi as the research objects from two English versions for contrastive analysis.With the quantitative and qualitative research method,this thesis collects 527 cultural-specific items in Luotuo Xiangzi and classifies them into five categories according to Nida's classification of culture,namely,linguistic cultural-specific items,material cultural-specific items,social cultural-specific items,ecological cultural-specific items and religious cultural-specific items.This thesis discusses the translation strategy adopted to render cultural-specific items in Evan King's version and Shi Xiaojing's version and summarizes seven translation methods used in two English versions,which are elaborated and exemplified respectively.Finally,this thesis analyzes the reasons for translation strategies and translation methods employed in both English versions from "historicity of understanding","fusion of horizons" and "effective history" in Gadamer's hermeneutics.It has been found that Evan King mainly adopted foreignization strategy in rendering cultural-specific items in Luotuo Xiangzi and more frequently used the conserving translation methods like linguistic translation and intratextual gloss;while domestication strategy is the dominant translation strategy in Shi Xiaojing's translation and substitution methods like absolute universalization and naturalization are more frequently used by her.Both Evan King and Shi Xiaojing translated those cultural-specific items in Luotuo Xiangzi under specific historical,social and cultural backgrounds,and the historicity leads to their prejudices,which further causes the conscious misreading and unconscious misreading in their translation.What's more,due to the differences between horizon of the original texts and the horizons of translators,translators would often conduct cultural filtrations in the translation process,which can bring their horizons closer to the texts' horizons.Different historicity brings up different translations,hence,the understanding of the translation over the same cultural-specific item in two English versions should be put under specific historical contexts of them.In virtue of the contrastive analysis of two English.versions of Luotuo Xiangzi,this thesis combines Gadamer's hermeneutics with the study on translation of cultural-specific items,which enriches the interdisciplinary translation studies and may generates some new enlightenments for future translation studies.