On Interpreting Strategies Of Culture-loaded Words From The Perspective Of Linguistic Memetics

Culture-loaded words present distinct national characteristics and cultural personalities.During annual press conference at the “Two Sessions”,the Premier expresses not only a kind of attitude towards China policy,but the Chinese philosophy and culture.As a result,many culture-loaded words are born.To convey those words correctly within a short time poses great challenges to interpreters.Culture-Loaded words theoretically can be regarded as a kind of meme or a set of memes.Meme is a basic unit of cultural evolution.Anything transmitted through imitation could be considered as a kind of meme.As language is the main carrier of meme transmission,the meme transmitted through language is linguistic meme.Therefore,the interpreting of culture-loaded words could be treated as the transmission of linguistic memes.So far,despite many studies on memetics conducted in the academia,much attention has been paid on the description of memetics and its guidance on the translation of culture-loaded words in literary works instead of in interpreting.Furthermore,culture-loaded words have been largely studied,though,the research perspectives were mainly from functional equivalence,relevance theory,interpretive theory or ecological translatology rather than from memetics.In addition,of the very few studies on culture-loaded words from the perspective of memetics,the theory has been largely underserved as the criterion to evaluate translation quality instead of as the instrument to guide the classification and translation of culture-loaded words.For that matter,this thesis constructs the “Chinese-English Consecutive Interpreting Corpus of the 2017-2019 Premier's Press Conferences at the ‘Two Sessions' ”.Based on the corpus analysis,it first classifies culture-loaded words into three categories according to the information representation and content of linguistic memes: form-meaning compound culture-loaded words(FMCWs),pronunciation derived culture-loaded words(PDWs)and culture-loaded words derived from morphological structures(MSDWs).Then this thesis explores the interpreting strategies of culture-loaded words,and finally summarizes the main interpreting strategies of FMCWs,PDWS,and MSDWs respectively after a careful analysis of their proportions in the three categories of culture-loaded words.The result shows that there are five interpreting strategies: source meme imitation(SMI),target meme imitation(TMI),dynamic imitation(DI),omission(OM)and source meme imitation plus explanation(SMIPE).Specifically,TMI and SMI are often applied in FMCWs,TMI,SMI and OM in PDWs,and SMI and TMI in MSDWs while SMIPE and OM are less applied.Based on the interpreting corpus,this thesis explores the classification and interpreting of culture-loaded words from the perspective of linguistic memetics.It is hoped that this thesis can offer a new perspective for studies on culture-loaded words,theoretically promote the application of linguistic memetics to interpreting,and provide implications for future studies in this regard.