On Transliteration Of Culturally-loaded Chinese Terms

In the long history of the development of Chinese culture, a number of expressions with unique Chinese cultural characteristics have gradually come into being, occupying an important position in Chinese culture over time. At the lexical level, these expressions are designated as culturally-loaded Chinese terms. As representative expressions of national mode of development and way of thinking, culturally-loaded Chinese terms play an important role in the promotion and development of Chinese culture. A more explicit way of translating culturally-loaded Chinese terms is of great significance to the communication of Chinese culture and to the participation of the fast-developing China in the construction of the multicultural system of the world. Translation studies on culturally-loaded Chinese terms have attracted wide attention in the translation world. However, as for translation strategies involved, quite a few translators still adopt domestication as a major tool by borrowing words and expressions with western color to interpret words with specific Chinese cultural indication, actually causing a loss of Chinese cultural information unconsciously. This loss is mainly due to the blind pursuit of equivalents in the target language and culture, or even the omission of such terms in translation, which has even led to misunderstandings on the part of the western world toward China to a certain extent.Transliteration, however, well keeps the original pinyin form of culturally-loaded Chinese terms, and avoids the misunderstandings due to different connotations of"equivalent terms"in the target language culture. Meanwhile, transliterated terms also exert a visual impact on the target reader due to its cultural otherness, attracting more attention to Chinese culture from foreign readers. In this situation, the role of transliteration as a compensation of traditional translation strategies has come into play naturally.This research takes culturally-loaded Chinese terms as its subject. On the basis of a wide range of data collection, this study takes the polysystem theory, cultural turn of translation and postcolonial translation theory as the main theoretical framework, and makes a systematic analysis of the transliteration of culturally-loaded Chinese terms. This research realizes that there is an asymmetry in the translation process of culturally-loaded Chinese terms, pointing out that transliteration is the most appropriate solution to the problems in the translation of culturally-loaded Chinese terms. This research also shows that in the long-run practice of English-Chinese transliteration, the number of transliterated English words in the Chinese language far exceeds that of Chinese terms in English, which creates a great"deficit"in the language flow. Thus, the promotion of transliterating culturally-loaded Chinese terms is also a necessary demand for an equal communication between the two cultures.Realizing the unstoppable trend of the transliteration of culturally-loaded Chinese terms, this research classifies culturally-loaded Chinese terms into four types: proper names, literary classics and philosophical terms, sociocultural terms and neologies, and makes specific discussions on each type of the terms. Regarding the transliteration of proper names, the translation world has long reached a consensus. This research stresses that in the transliteration of proper names with rich Chinese cultural features, especially names of people and places, special attention needs to be paid to the difference between standard pinyin system and the Wade-Giles system, and standard pinyin form should be employed in order to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings. Literary classics and philosophical terms are a group of terms reflecting the essence of Chinese literature and philosophy. The transliteration of these terms will attract the target language reader's concern on such terms, and thus play a crucial role in the communication of the essence of Chinese literature and philosophy. Sociocultural terms are the reflections of social life and folk culture, and the transliteration of such terms can be the true communication of Chinese cultural information to target language readers, thus reducing otherwise unavoidable misunderstandings of Chinese culture. Neologies include the old words with new meanings and the terms created under social and cultural development. Such terms capture the forefront pulse of the social and cultural development and are the true picture of the new-born culture, and the transliteration of neologies is the exact reflection of the changing times. Taking the acceptance of transliterated terms into consideration, this research comes up with two levels of transliteration, that is, complete transliteration and incomplete transliteration, and takes incomplete transliteration as the intergradation for further acceptance of complete transliterated terms, in order to achieve a complete transliteration of culturally-loaded Chinese terms. Overall, this study demonstrates the significance of the transliteration of culturally-loaded Chinese terms to the cultural construction of translation and the construction of a multicultural world under the frame of polysystem theory, the cultural turn of translation and postcolonial translation theory. It offers tentative predictions to the trend of the transliteration of culturally-loaded Chinese terms, giving out transliteration recommendations on the four categories of terms based on a large number of examples. Hopefully, this research can bring some enlightenment to future researchers and contribute to the dissemination of Chinese culture in the world which, to a great extent, resides in the translation process.