Birch's Translation Of Culture-loaded Words In The Peony Pavilion:A Perspective Of Philosophical Hermeneutics

The theoretical framework of the thesis is philosophical hermeneutics,and the three philosophical principles-“historicity of understanding”,“fusion of horizons” and “effective history” put forward by Gadamer are the starting points to have a research on culture-loaded words of The Peony Pavilion which was created by Tang Xianzu and translated by American Sinologist Cyril Birch.The purpose is to explore mistranslations of culture-loaded words in Birch's version and find out the reasons,thus giving some suggestions for the translation of culture-loaded words of classical works.The study finds out that from the “historicity of understanding”,Birch's cognitive ability was limited under a certain historical circumstance,and his “reasonable prejudices” or pre-understandings caused under-translation of culture-loaded words,thus not well conveying the deep meaning of them.However,from the “fusion of horizons”,a complete fusion of the translator,target readers and original author's horizons during the translation is impossible due to cultural differences.The study shows that Birch applied cultural filtration and omitted cultural images of culture-loaded words,which was convenient for target readers to understand them but missed Chinese traditional images.From the “effective history”,it emphasizes the openness and incompleteness of meaning of a text.Due to historical limitations or Birch's own cognitive ability,under-translation of culture-loaded words exists.Cultural filtration and other deficiencies of the translation made unnecessary loss of form and content of the source text.All those deficiencies of the translation lay a basis for other translators to better understand culture-loaded words and re-translate the work under a new historical background.The translation of culture-loaded words should change with language requirements of different times,and deep cultural meanings of these words can be improved through proper re-translation.From Gadamer's three philosophical principles,the study finds out that the process of translation is affected by the translator's historical limitations,cognitive ability and other factors,thus leading to the incompleteness and openness of the translation during cultural translation.The study provides a new perspective for the translation of culture-loaded words with the theory of philosophical hermeneutics and demonstrates the necessity of re-translation of The Peony Pavilion and other Chinese traditional classical works at the same time.