A Multiple Commentary Perspective To The English Translation Of Chinese Culture-Loaded Words In Sichuan Tourism Texts

Culture-loaded words (CLWs) are important carriers reflecting the culture of a nation. In recent years, scholars from home and abroad have made a great many researches on CLWs, which enriches and develops the studies of CLWs in both theory and practice, and provides some insightful academic ideas into the study as well. In the existing literature, it is found that there is a relative inadequacy in the study of CLW translation in Sichuan tourism texts, especially case-based study for Chinese-to-English translation of local-Sichuan tourism-culture-bound CLWs is needed to extend the scope of such words.Based on this situation, with the English translation of Chinese CLWs in Sichuan tourism texts as the study subject, taking Newmark's text type translation theory as the backbone and his Semantic Translation and Communicative Translation approaches as verification criteria, and borrowing Professor Gu Zhengkun's analytic framework rooted on Multi-commentary Perspective, the thesis explores, by employing a qualitative case study method, the Chinese-English translation strategies of CLWs in Sichuan tourism text. The author of the thesis hopes that the study would enrich the researches of CLWs in tourism texts and promote the development of Sichuan tourism industry.Considering that there is no universal definition for CLWs, the thesis refers to Nida's CLWs classification and defines CLWs into five types, with each type being delimited to a certain scope. The five classifications are: social and ethnical words, material words, ecological words, linguistic words and religious words. The source texts from which CLWs are selected are from five scenic attractions in Sichuan:Dufu Thatched Cottage, Wuhou Temple, Jinsha Site, and Giant Panda Base. Secondly, factors affecting the Chinese-English translation are analyzed. These factors include linguistic differences and cultural differences, the latter of which include social ethnical gap, history gap, geographical gap, religious gap, food gap and lexical-choice gap. Because gaps such as these may greatly influence the "functional equivalence" and the target language translation may result in a big loss of the source language cultural-specific meanings, clarifying these gaps helps a deeper exploration of seeking a dynamic equivalent cross-culturally and cross-linguistically and achieving the faithfulness to the original and local cultural-bound information on the one hand, and acceptability or readability of the translation to the target reader on the other Finally, with the culture-loaded words as the specific study subject, the thesis analyzes and generalizes some practical translation features of each type of CLWs. For the translations which can not properly reflect the cultural meaning of the source language, the author puts forward some suggested translation strategies and interprets the reasons for selecting these translation strategies.Through the analysis, a conclusion is obtained:some of the English translation of Chinese CLWs in Sichuan tourism texts has the problem of inappropriateness in reflecting the source language culture. The combination of Semantic Translation, Communicative Translation and Multi-commentary Perspective is feasible in solving some of the mentioned problems. Based on case analysis, this thesis generalizes some translation strategies to solve the inappropriate translation of the CLWs. It is hoped these strategies can play a role in future CLWs translation study.