Translation Report Of Rich People Problems(Excerpt):A Cultural Back-Translation Perspective

The report is written to demonstrate the English to Chinese translation process and its implication of ten chapters of Rich People Problems from the perspective of cultural back-translation.The novel is the last book of Singaporean-American writer Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich trilogy which deeply rooted in the Chinese culture.The report aims to find out when translating the novel back into Chinese,what kind of information in the source text should be restored rather than translated directly,and how exactly should they be rendered to preserve their cultural elements.Cultural back-translation is the restoration of culture when cultural elements of the target language appear in the source text.The translator needs to be fully aware of what cultural elements did the author referred to,which should be translated back into their established or conventional forms.Some information in the source text even has implicit cultural reference which may need to be translated in an explicit way.It is found that Chinese cultural elements are expressed in source text in two ways:(1)Chinese names,interjections,Hokkien and spoken language in Cantonese and others are preserved in Wade-Giles romanization system;(2)Chinese values,custom and concepts are either implicitly or explicitly delivered in English.Owning to the above observations,naturalization was adopted in order to achieve cultural back-translation with specific translating methods:(1)expressions in Wade-Giles romanization system was translated into Chinese by direct borrowing,transliteration,and deletion;(2)addition,translating into Chinese idiomatic expressions,cultural substitution,and retention and correction were used to restore information in the source text with Chinese cultural roots.Thus,it can be concluded that in cultural back-translation,the translator must first analyze the nature of culture-related elements in the source text and how the author expressed them.If they are implicit in the source text,some translating methods must be adopted to make them more evident to the target readers.Moreover,in terms of Translation Studies,more focus can be given to how Singaporean English literature is translated into Chinese.