A Tentative Study Of Cultural-loaded Words Translation From The Perspective Of Memetic-adaptation

Memetics is a theory of cultural evolution, and language is an important carrier of memes. Culture-loaded words as a kind of special language memes, whose transmission across language and cultural barriers, obey the laws of survival of the fittest. Therefore, it needs the translator to adjust the linguistic choices to adapt to the "three world " and linguistic context correlates according to the Theory of Adaptation. The previous principles and methods about the translation of culture-loaded words are various and scattered. Rarely had they been analyzed under a certain theoretical framework for systematic study. Therefore, the present research aims to integrate the theoretical achievements of Memetics and the Theory of Adaptation to propose the concept of Memetic-adaptation to interpret the translation of culture-loaded words. The explanative and demonstrative approaches will be mainly adopted by the author to demonstrate the rationalities of Memetic-adaptation in practical translation.The thesis is made up of four chapters. Chapter One is about literature review by retrospecting the relevant translation studies which adopt the theories of Memetics and Adaptation, as well as the language studies which apply the synthetic studies of Memetic-adaptation. Chapter Two is a brief introduction to the studies of culture-loaded words as a kind of special language memes. Chapter Three is about the theoretic foundation, in which the concept of Memetic-adaptation will be proposed. Chapter Four is the exemplifications of Memetic-adaptation which will be exemplified with the discussion of contextual correlates adaptability and the structural objects of adaptability respectively. Contextual correlates adaptability includes the adaptation to mental world, social world and physical world. The structural objects of adaptability includes the adaptation of language structure, rhythm and rhyme as well as intertextuality. Chapter Five is the meditation and inspirations from the inner properties of Memetic-adaptation for the translation of culture-loaded words.Through the discussions and analysis above, the author finds that the translator’s linguistic choices need to adapt to both the contextual correlates adaptability and the structural objects of adaptability during the course of rendering the culture-loaded words. The culture-loaded words which satisfy the adaptation objects mentioned above can be transmitted across language and cultural barriers to be strong language memes, hereby, to preferably survive in the target cognitive environment. Meanwhile, the inner properties of strong language memes have some significance to interpret the translation of culture-loaded words.The present research is merely a tentative study based on Memetics and the Theory of Adaptation. Therefore, the defects of the argumentations inevitably exist. Whereas, Memetic-adaptation as a theoretical inquiry and attempt, it still hopes to provide a new scope to systematically analyze the translation of culture-loaded words.