On The Translation Of Chinese Culture-loaded Idioms

The study of the English translation of Chinese idioms is significant, especially when theidioms are culture-loaded words. A good translation of such idioms can not only make the targettext readable for English readers, but also better deliver the cultural implicitness to the readers.This thesis proposed the concept of Culture-loaded Idiom (CLI), and set up a corpus ofChinese CLIs. The samples of this corpus were drawn from the famous Chinese classical works,Three Kingdoms, and its English translation by Moss Roberts. After an analysis of thecharacteristics of Chinese CLIs, Aixelá’s11kinds of translation strategies for culture-specificitems are evaluated. Then a set of4kinds of translation strategies for Chinese CLIs are put forward.This set of strategies are compared with Aixelá’s11strategies quantitatively, and prove to besimpler, more effective and highly applicable to Chinese-English CLI translation.In chapter1, some typical researches on cultural translation are reviewed, and some recentstudies on translation of Chinese cultural loaded words and Chinese idioms are introduced. Inchapter2, the cultural characteristics of Chinese idioms are analyzed, and121CLIs drawn fromThree Kingdoms are classified into3categories as character description, behavior description, andemotion or scene description. In Chapter3, M. Roberts’ translation strategies of the CLIs in ThreeKingdoms are discussed based on Aixelá’s theory of Culture-Specific Items, and a quantified anddescriptive analysis of the usage of Aixelá’s11translation strategies for the CLIs is provided. InChapter4, four translation strategies for Chinese CLI are presented, and a quantified analysis of thefour strategies’ application to M. Roberts’ translation of CLIs in Three Kingdoms is presented as acomparison with Aixelá’s theory. In Chapter5, based on the study of M. Roberts’ translations ofCLIs in Three Kingdoms, and the quantified analysis in Chapter4, some suppositions are made forthe usage of our four strategies in translation of Chinese CLIs, and how to choose the four strategies when you translate Chinese CLIs is discussed from different aspects.