On Strategies Of Translating Chinese Culture-specific Items In Light Of Skopos Theory

Science and Civilization in China(SCC)is the first monumental masterpiece comprehensively introducing the developing process of Chinese science and technology with systematic and detailed materials.This work covers an amazing range of fields and arouses a rather deep reflection among readers.However,although SCC is widely acknowledged by international readers and plays an eminent role in promoting Chinese culture,the translation of Chinese classics in it has not been fully studied until now.This research is based on the theory of culture-specific items(CSIs)and identifies culture items from the volume of Mathematics and the first ten chapters of the volume of History of Scientific Thoughts.Statistics and exemplification are employed to analyze these culture items and their translation strategies.Through research,it is found that 63 Chinese classics are quoted in the selected texts,falling into nine types: philosophy,astronomy,encyclopedia,Chinese poetry,historical notes,novel,mathematical classics,historical classics and Buddhist scripture.Within the quoted Chinese classics,536 Chinese CSIs have been found out,which fall into six main categories of religious culture,material culture,ecological culture,political culture,social culture and educational culture.In terms of their distribution,CSIs of educational culture account for 37.2%,followed by those of social culture(25.5%),ecological culture(16.1%),religious culture(8.9%),political culture(8.4%)and material culture(3.9%).Meanwhile,translation strategies in line with Chinese CSIs in the selected texts are summarized as follows: transliteration,linguistic interpretation,extra-textual gloss,intra-textual gloss,reference translation,synonym,limited universalization,absolute universalization,naturalization,deletion,fixed translation and transliteration plus absolute universalization.And the former five strategies are generalized in foreignization while the later five are classified as domestication.Thus,in Mathematics,foreignization occupies a proportion of 49.2% in translating these CSIs and domestication holds a proportion of 24.6%,with the remaining 26.2% adopting both foreignization and domestication.In History of Scientific Thoughts,foreignization accounts for 52.9% and domestication for 39.7%.And the remaining 7.4% are the combination of both foreignization and domestication.All in all,the strategy of foreignization occupies an overwhelmingly dominant position in the translation of CSIs in the selected texts.From the perspective of skopos theory,the leading position of foreignization is closely related to translation skopos.To better spread Chinese traditional culture,Joseph Needham adopts proper domestication to create a familiar atmosphere for target readers so as to inform them of basic background information.Then with enormous exposure of foreignization,especially transliteration,the memory of previous source culture is recovered.Therefore,Joseph realizes his initial and ultimate translation purpose.