Strategies For Translating Culture-Specific Items

This translation report is based on the English-to-Chinese translation of a book,Goths:A Guide to an American Subculture(excerpt),which is an in-depth exploration of goth culture.It contains a lot of words and expressions closely related to goth culture and other subcultures,including proper nouns and fixed expressions that are difficult to understand and translate,and some concepts and ideas that might be unacceptable in Chinese culture.These words and expressions,which can be referred to as culture-specific items,create road bumps for the translator.To solve this problem,this report focused on the culture-specific items,and selected 25 cases for detailed analysis.The case analysis applies Aixela’s translation strategies,including repetition,extratextual and intratextual gloss,limited and absolute universalization,deletion,etc.The translator analyzes the strategies used in every case with the aim of exploring the feasibility of Aixela’s translation strategies in English to Chinese translation.The analysis also applies Aixela’s explanatory structure of parameters for the culture-specific item.The four parameters are supratextual,textual,intratextual parameters,and the nature of culture-specific items.In the case analysis section,the culture-specific item cases are first categorized into two groups,which are,proper nouns and common expressions.After analyzing these categorized cases under Aixela’s strategies and explanatory structure,the report finds that,in the rendering of proper nouns,extratextual gloss is applied the most frequently,with the purpose of providing background information.While in the second category of common expressions,intratextual gloss is more often used,in order to make the target text understandable without interrupting the reading.It should also be noted that the combination of strategies and the adjustment of certain strategies are very necessary and quite feasible during translating.And every culture-specific item should be rendered properly considering different factors by applying different strategies under specific circumstances.