| Memetics, based on the theory of evolution put forward by Charles Robert Darwin, is proposed by Richard Dawkins, a zoologist and behavioral ecologist in Oxford University. Memes, like genes, possessing their own life-cycle, can be replicated and transmitted. Translation, an important way for cultural communication and transmission, is a valuable means for the replication and the spread of memes. From memetic perspective, translation is a process in which the translator actively decodes and gets infected by memes in the source text firstly, and then encodes these memes and as a result, the translated version is produced. To be a strong meme is the precondition for a translation being accepted by target readers and how the translator decodes and encodes plays a significant role to achieve this goal. Culture-loaded words translation is a process of decoding and encoding, in which the criteria of strong memes, like novelty, coherence, formality and copy-fidelity, should be embodied. The author classifies culture-loaded words in The Translation of Selected of Modern Chinese Essays into five categories according to Nida’s classification of cultur and picks out 40 examples of each type, constructing a corpus. Through analysis of the corpus, the author finds that the translator adopts nine translation methods in the translation of culture-loaded words: literal translation, transliteration, addition, annotation, paraphrase, generalization, replacement, blending and omission. And after analyzing and comparing the translation methods and the strong meme criteria in translation, the author finds that there are similarities between them, getting the conclusion that translators will adopt different translation methods to transmit memes of culture-loaded words and to make these memes strong ones. |
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