A Study On The Translation Strategies Of Culture-specific Items In Big Breasts And Wide Hips From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Translation,as a kind of interlingual communication,is not just a pure language conversion but also an exchange of culture between different languages.In 2012,Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature for Big Breasts and Wide Hips.Undoubtedly,Howard Goldblatt's translation made a significant contribution to winning respect from the Western World and “going out” of Chinese culture.The thesis mainly focuses on the translation strategies of culture-specific items,which are to be classified into two categories: proper nouns and common expressions.By using of the translation strategies proposed by Aixela,the researcher analyzes the translation strategies of the cultural specific items in Big Breasts and Wide Hips.Studies have shown that the translator mainly uses eight of the eleven translation strategies.They are orthographic adaption,linguistic translation,extratextual gloss,intratextual gloss,synonymy,absolute universalization,naturalization,and deletion.The first four strategies try to be faithful to the source text and conserve the original meaning and form of culture-specific items.The latter four strategies belong to the substitution strategy.The translator tries to meet the needs of the target text readers and keep intra-textual coherence.In a word,translator adopts these translation strategies to achieve the “skopos” to spread Chinese culture to the world.Orthographic adaption is mainly used in translating names of people and places.Goldblatt adopts transcription and transliteration to translate these culture-specific items.Linguistic translation is frequently used to translate material and social culture words through matching a close reference in the target language.During the research,the researcher also finds some mistranslations of culture-specific items existing in Big Breasts and Wide Hips.In the conclusion part,the researcher provides another translation version to these mistranslated culture-specific items according to the researcher's understanding.