Translation Of Culture-specific Items In Popular Science Books Under Cultural Translation Theory

Popular science books have been frequently introduced into the Chinese market and ranked top among many bestseller lists during the past decades.Its translation is drawing increasing attention from researchers in the Chinese translation studies community.This thesis mainly discusses the culture-specific items in popular science books,taking The Employee Experience,a popular science book on management,as a case to analyze the translation strategies of such items.Many Chinese and Western researchers have put forward their definitions,classifications and translating strategies on culture-specific items.Javier Franco Aixelá first proposes the concept of culture-specific items and eleven translation strategies.Eugene Nida classifies cultures into five types,that is ecological culture,material culture,social culture,religious culture and linguistic culture.This thesis collects the culture-specific items in the project and puts them into three categorizations: religious,linguistic and social culture-specific items.The translation strategies proposed by Aixelá are also used in this thesis.The theoretical basis of this thesis is the cultural translation theory put forward by Susan Bassnett.She points out the importance of cultural function and cultural background,and pursues the equivalence at both linguistic and cultural levels.The thesis yields the following findings through analytic induction: Religious culturespecific items usually reflect complicated background,so translators can transform such items by “extratextual gloss” or “absolute universalization”.Linguistic culturespecific items are likely to increase the aesthetic interest,so translators may transplant the original language features by means of “intratextual gloss” or “limited universalization”.When it comes to social culture-specific items,the translation of names of people and companies mainly adopt the strategy of “transliteration” or “repetition”,and use “intratextual gloss” to explain the background information in some cases;the items related to social events can usually be transformed by “intratextual gloss” or “absolute universalization” in order to achieve the maximum cultural functional equivalence.