A Study On Chinese-english Translation Of The Cultural Vacancy In Science Fiction From The Perspective Of Semantic Field Theory

Since the end of the Qing Dynasty,western science fiction has been introduced into China.And the translation of classic western science fiction works had been dominant in the book market in China for a long time.The “going global” of Chinese science fiction is a newly emerging cultural phenomenon.The English translation of Liu Cixin's book series the Three-body Trilogy has been a great success in the English world and has become a pioneering work of Chinese science fiction that entered into the English world.This trilogy,which set an excellent example for Chinese science fiction in the field of international literary exchange,is highly accepted and praised by the English-speaking world.The success of this trilogy on the world stage cannot be done without the translator's high-level translation.Therefore,it is necessary for us to learn from its successful translation experience and study the C-E translation strategies and methods to help the translation works of local sci-fi going global in the future in terms of experience sharing and theoretical construction.I found a special cultural phenomenon in science fiction during the research process.The technological concepts,social systems,and spiritual culture created by the author belong to the imaginary world only and don't exist in reality.Those imaginary cultural images account for a relatively large proportion in science fiction works.And such particular vacancy of culture is the key and difficult element in the practice of translating science fiction from Chinese to English.The translation of literary works is interconnected with culture to a large extent,and the existence of cultural vacancy in the target language is the phenomenon quite normal.But such vacancy means that there is no cultural images in the target language equal to that of the source language.While the vacancy in sci-fi works comes from the authors creation and does not exist either in the target nor in the source language.I introduced the semantic filed theory in accordance with this special writing feature to analyze the text contents relevant to the alien civilizations and the future world of humans.This work is to summarize the translation skills and methods of words under such category.And I find that these words can be classified as three big semantic fields as material culture,spirit culture and social culture.Those three semantic fields together formed the general sci-fi cultural semantic field.Meanwhile,they can be sub-divided into smaller semantic field for analyze and research.Through the above stated way,the translation methods of cultural vacancy can be settled accordingly.