A Memetic Approach To Translating Culture-loaded Expressions

Language represents the means and carrier of information exchanges,which is the initial purpose of translation.From the perspective of meme,translation thus becomes the replication and transmission of the source language memes in the target language.Andrew Chesterman believed that translation is survival machines for memes,and referred to memes involving translation itself,translation concepts,ideas and translation theories as translation memes,among which five translation supermemes feature prominently.Translation memes carry significance towards cultural transmission.Since the 1920 s,Lu Xun�s short stories have been translated into many languages and published worldwide with high reputation,thus enabling the culture-loaded words and expressions contained to be regarded as memes or meme-complexes.Therefore,this thesis aims to analyze the expression of culture-loaded words in the English versions of Lu Xun�s short stories under the guidance of memetics.The selected translation versions are Wang Chi-chen�s version in 1941 and Julia Lovell�s version in 2009.Through the comparative study of the two translators on their replication and transmission of source language memes and the research of the two translations on different types of culture-loaded words and expressions,this thesis tries to probe into whether effective meme transmission of culture-loaded words could be achieved through the translation supermemes.By comparing the original text and two translated texts,this thesis discusses the differences in language information and cultural information under the guidance of memetics and analyzes the two translations of Lu Xun�s short stories in light of translation supermemes.It concludes that in the replication and transmission of culture-loaded information,two translation supermemes,namely the source-target language supermeme and all-writing-is-translating supermeme,are the most common in the transmission of heterogeneous cultural memes.Moreover,this thesis confirms that it is feasible to apply memetics to the cause of studying the translation and practice of Chinese literary works,which might shed some light on the going global of China�s literature and culture.