Translated Abstract
Alongside the focus of translation shifting from the linguistic aspect into culture, the significance of introducing Chinese culture into the world through translation has been realized by more and more scholars. Culturally loaded words, as the most important reflections of distinct culture, pose great cultural gap to literal translation at the same time. Therefore, successful translation of culturally loaded words has always been a painstaking task as well as a desirable pursuit for most translators. The study of how to choose appropriate translation strategies to deal with different types of culturally loaded words will be quite necessary to benefit cultural translation and enhance intercultural communication.
With this aim in view, the present thesis is a research on the translation strategies of culturally loaded words in a novel by a Shaanxi writer, The People of Chicken’s Nest Hollow. Chosen from Mr. Jia’s “Shangzhou Series”, this novel has abundant culturally loaded words presenting both Shaanxi dialects and local customs, thus the investigation into it will bear considerable instructional meaning in promoting cultural translation.
In this paper, the author aims at collecting the culturally loaded words in The People of Chicken’s Nest Hollow and examining their translations. Based on Nida’s classification of culture, culturally loaded words in the novel are categorized in to five types, namely, ecological words, social words, material words, religious words and linguistic words. Then, the strategies adopted in translating these culturally loaded words are studied in terms of free translation, omission, literal translation and compensation.
According to the analysis of the translation of the culturally loaded words in The People of Chicken’s Nest Hollow, the author finds that domestication is employed by the translator as the main translation strategy and foreignization is adopted complementarily.
After investigating into the translation methods utilized in the translation of the novel, the author analyzes two traps in the course of cultural translation and the major drawback of the translation of culturally loaded words. Besides, an examination of mistranslations existing in the novel is presented with detailed discussions.
As the suggestions for future improvement, the author analyzes the factors affecting effective selection of translation strategies and proposes a systematic translation method to tackle culturally loaded words.
This thesis aims to benefit the selection of appropriate translation strategies for culturally loaded words in order to help translators to bridge the cultural gap in literal translation.
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