A Study Of English Translation Of Culture-Specific Items In Yu Hua's Brothers

Xiongdi(??),a rambling fictional masterpiece by contemporary Chinese writer Yu Hua,was initially published in two volumes during 2005-2006.Depicting the lives of two stepbrothers Baldy Li and Song Gang,Brothers offers a snapshot of modern China's four decades of tremendous transformation from the Cultural Revolution to a hyper-capitalist society.The novel has met with violently opposed critical response in China.It is co-translated into English by American sinologist Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-yin Chow,the husband-wife duo.The English version entitled Brothers:A Novel was published in January 2009 by the New York-based Pantheon Books of Random House.Largely thanks to the controversy it had aroused in China,the novel garnered unusual critical acclaim in the English-speaking world after its release.Existing studies of the English translation are almost all focused on binary oppositions,including domesticating translation vs.foreignizing translation,liberal translation vs.literal translation,which fails to reveal the translators'resourcefulness and flexibility in employing various translation strategies.This thesis aims to study the translators'treatment of culture-specific items in the novel.It draws on Javier Aixelá's taxonomy of translation strategies for treating culture-specific items and Daniel Simeoni's concept of the translator's habitus,combining both statistical and textual analyses.The thesis comprises five central chapters in addition to Introduction,Conclusion and Appendix.Chapter One offers a critical review of the main literature on the novel itself and its English translation.Chapter Two presents the theoretical framework adopted in this study.Chapter Three examines chief translator Carlos Rojas' s professional trajectory and the translators' preface attached to the English text.It is found that as a scholar-translator Carlos Rojas' s professional habitus influences both his selection of Brothers for translation and his translator's habitus.The latter is embodied in the way he treats culture-specific items in the Chinese text,that is,he tries to keep a dynamic balance between preservationist and assimilative strategies,whichawaits further verification.Chapter Four makes a statistical analysis of the Chinese original and the English version,aiming to reveal the translators' overall tendency to adopt translation strategies when treating culture-specific items.The present author randomly collected 300culture-specific items from the Chinese text and analyzed their English translations in the light of Aixelá's taxonomy of translation strategies for treating culture-specific items.The statistical results show that the translators indeed try to strike a rough balance between cultural conservation and cultural substitution,with the former(53%)slightly outnumbering the latter(47%),though they are more inclined to preserve the cultural connotations in the original culture-specific items.Chapter Five looks at more than fifty examples to analyze ten translation strategies observed in rendering culture-specific items in Brothers,attempting to probe into the translators' decision-making process.It is found that when a culture-specific item is judged to be both acceptable and comprehensible to target readers,it is often conserved chiefly through linguistic(non-cultural)translation.Otherwise,the translators resort to cultural substitution mainly through absolute universalization and naturalization.Meanwhile,deletion is sometimes employed when the translators decided that a culture-specific item was too obscure for the general English reader and there was no need to preserve it in the English text.The Conclusion summarizes the main findings and conclusions,followed by discussions of the implications of this study.It is noted that the translators' flexibility and resourcefulness in translating culture-specific items in Brothers can help promote the novel's circulation and reception in the Anglophone world.The author suggests that a study of Brothers in English translation from a sociological perspective,focused on the process of its production,publication and reception,will enable us to better understand its actual reception in the West.