A Study On The Translation Of Culture-loaded Words In The Three-Body Problem Trilogy From The Perspective Of Frame Theory

A broadening spectrum of the audience of science fiction in China has encouraged numerous writers to produce more and more works.Liu Cixin,the writer of The ThreeBody Problem trilogy,is one of the biggest names in the domain of Chinese sci-fi.Thanks to the two translators,Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen,the novel has been warmly received overseas,which attracts scholars’ attention.The translation of culture-loaded words is a significant area of interest within the field of translation studies.However,researchers have not treated these words in The Three-Body Problem trilogy in much detail.This investigation focuses on the English translation of The Three-Body Problem trilogy,which won the Hugo prize in 2015,and explores the transference of Chinese culture-loaded words from the perspective of the frame theory by Charles Fillmore.The author first sifts out 337 Chinese-culture-loaded words in the Chinese version of The Three-Body Problem trilogy and classifies them.Combined with their English versions translated by Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen,a small bilingual parallel corpus has been built.From there,the author deconstructs the translating devices like adding or deleting frames or frame elements and transplanting the frames used in the translation of culture-loaded words with case studies.By doing that,the author further explores the four relations of equivalence,incorporating,overlapping,and alienation between source text(Chinese)frames and target text(English)frames.Inspired by the difference between the number of frame elements of words in the source text and target text,the author then proposes a quantitative formula to measure the target readers’ reception of the culture-loaded words.Plus,questionnaire assessments are collected from 49 English readers to validate the formula by means of the Chi-square test.Results show that a)the deletion of frame elements is mostly adopted by the translator considering cultural differences;b)the most apparent frame relation is that the frames of the source text incorporate frames in the target text,with the number of 85%;and c)the reception of culture-loaded words in the trilogy is 39%,according to the ratio of the number of frame elements in the target text to the number of frame elements in the source text.By analyzing translating devices and measuring the reception of Chinese cultureloaded words,this thesis tries to smooth the path for Chinese culture going abroad.