The Interlingual Development Of Memes In The Classic Of Tea --A Practice Report On The Back Translation Of All About Tea

The Classic of Tea is the first monograph about tea in the world. Due to its authority, it disseminated tea culture into the world through translation across time and space of cross-culture communication. However, translators from foreign countries can not completely understand the figure of speech and structures in tea classics, so some changes have happened in this process. Through the description in English works All about Tea, the source language author subjectively omitted some elegant words of Lu Yu, making English version less Chinese characteristics but bringing Chinese tea culture to the western world at the same time. Translators from the motherland are qualified to bring Chinese culture to the world. With the collaboration between excellent English and Chinese translators, classics about tea and other fields can be better conveyed to the world.In fact, changes through translation can be seen as the linguistic phenomenon called memes, which were first put forward by famous Britain scientist Richard Dawkins-The Selfish Gene referring to "a cultural element or behavioral trait whose transmission and consequent persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means (esp. imitation), is considered as analogous to the inheritance of a gene." And Finland Andrew Chesterman introduced memes to translation studies. He pointed out that there were lots of translation memes during the process of cross-culture translation. On the one hand, each meme was not only the copying and inheriting of the original meme; on the other hand, it would also produce certain variations in the process of reproduction and transmission according to the need of development.This paper shows the memetic association between The Classic of Tea and All about Tea, for example changes, variations and omissions when William Ukers translated The Classic of Tea into the English version-All about Tea. Here back translation can be taken to translate All about Tea and comparison between the translation edition and modern Chinese edition of The Classic of Tea. The author explores the interlingual development of The Classic of Tea as the original text of memes and finishes the translation report.