A Study On The Translation Of Culture-specific Items In The English Version Of Huo Zhe

To Live is a novel written by Yu Hua,a contemporary Chinese writer.It has been praised widely and won many awards after its publication.It has also been translated into French,Italian,Japanese,Korean,English and other versions and published in many countries,which is a sign of the successful export of Chinese local culture.The novel has strong local flavor and characteristics,so it is rich in many culture-specific items,thus,the translation of these culture-specific items becomes one of the key factors for the translator to convey the Chinese cultural information to the target readers.Susan Bassnett once published the book Translation,History and Culture,in which she introduced the main content of cultural translation theory and put forward cultural functional equivalence.At the same time,she was also the first one who proposed that translation research should take the “cultural turn”.As an important part of cultural translation theory,cultural functional equivalence can provide evaluation criteria for translation studies of cultural factors in many literary works,in the English version of Huo Zhe,the translator Michael Berry adopts different translation strategies in translating culture-specific items,so this thesis uses cultural functional equivalence in Bassnett's cultural translation theory as the evaluation standard to analyze 264 culture-specific items,and attempts to explore which translation strategies are used by the translator when translating the culture-specific items in To Live,and to what extent these culture-specific items achieve cultural functional equivalence,and what factors affect the translator's choice of translation strategies.This thesis draws the following conclusions:(1)In translating culture-specific items in To Live,the use of cultural conservation strategy(70.1%)is more frequent than that of cultural substitution strategy(29.9%),the translator Michael Berry adopts seven translation strategies,among which linguistic translation(64.4%)is the major translation strategy used by the translator to retain the original culture-specific items;absolute universalization(17.8%)is the major translation strategy used by the translator to replace the original culture-specific items;(2)In the English version To Live,245 out of the 264 culture-specific items have achieved cultural functional equivalence,with a realization rate of 93.2%.Therefore,to a large extent,the translation has achieved cultural functional equivalence with the original.Among them,the realization rates of the extra-textual gloss(100%)and transliteration(100%)are the highest,the realization rates of other strategies are naturalization(93.8%),absoluteuniversalization(93.6%),linguistic translation(92.4%),autonomous creation(88.9%),omission(83.3%);(3)The factors that influence translator's choice of translation strategies for culture-specific items include Michael Berry's translation ideas,the imbalance of cultural acceptance,the expectation of target language readers and the previous translated versions of culture-specific items.