Translation Study Of Culture-specific Items

Taipei People is a collection of short stories written by Pai Hsienyung,a representative writer of Taiwanese literature.It is highly praised by scholars from home and abroad,and is ranked seventh among the top 100 Chinese novels of the twentieth century by Asiaweek.Pai Hsien-yung’s language style is unique and contains a large number of linguistic culture-specific items,such as idioms and dialectal words,rhetorical devices including antithesis,repetition,and metaphor.As something unique to a particular culture,a culture-specific item reflects the unique way of activity of a specific people that has gradually formed over a long period of history and differs from that of other peoples.Due to its uniqueness,there is no equivalent item with the same meaning and status in other language systems,so it has become a major difficulty in translation.The treatment of cultural-specific items is also crucial to the success of the translation in bridging the gap between the two cultures and languages.This paper aims to study the translation of linguistic culturespecific items in the English translation of his major work Taipei People,from the skopos perspective.Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods,the research establishes a bilingual parallel corpus of all linguistic culture-specific items in the translation classified from four aspects,including morphological,phonological,syntactical,and lexical one.According to the 12 translation strategies for culture-specific items proposed by Aixela,the frequency of employing each translation strategy in each category is counted,with particular attention paid to the most frequently used translation strategies in each type of culture-specific items.In this way,the overall style of the translation is evaluated.By selecting representative examples manually in eight sub-categories for individual case analysis,this study explores the application of three principles of the Skopos theory in translation,namely fidelity,coherence,and skopos principles,and how they guide translators in their choice of translation strategies,as well as final results achieved.The study finds that the English translation of Taipei People mainly employs a strategy of absolute universalization in terms of linguistic culture-specific items,and the overall style tends to naturalization,reflecting the coherence principle and skopos principle among the three principles of Skopos theory.It benefits the acceptance of target readers and their perception of aesthetic connotations conveyed by the source text.Moreover,it is conducive to promoting the dissemination of Chinese literature overseas as well as the exchange and communication between Eastern and Western cultures.This study establishes a parallel corpus of linguistic culturespecific items,and explores how the three principles of Skopos theory guide the choice of translation strategies,hopefully providing a convenient reference for future translation practice and theoretical research.