A Study On The Translation Of Culture-Loaded Words From The Perspective Of Cross-Cultural Communication

Cross-cultural communication plays an increasingly significant role in a globalizing world.And since the 1970 s,with the proposal of “cultural turn” in translation study circles and the development of interdisciplinary research,cross-cultural translation has been developing rapidly as a trend.Scholars in this field have raised a series of cross-cultural translation theories.Not confined to word for word linguistic conversion and analysis,cross-cultural translation begins to regard translating as a cross-cultural communication activity and takes into account cultural factors including social,historical,political and religious elements of the society.It requires the translators not only to have profound bilingual capacity but have susceptive cross-cultural consciousness.Only in doing so,can the information and the sense of the source text be conveyed to the target readers.Cross-cultural consciousness is a leading thread throughout the translating process which determines translators' choice of translating strategies and methods.This study takes the first Chinese Nobel Prize winner,Mo Yan's masterpiece Life and Death are Wearing Me Out and the most influential translator,Howard Goldblatt's translation as its research material.It is a novel narrating 50 years' dramatic reform in Chinese rural areas from the year 1950 to the year 2000.It is rich in expressions loaded with cultural features which are direct reflections of the specific Chinese culture.Thus an analysis of the translation of these expressions is of great importance to the dissemination of Chinese culture overseas.The classification of culture-loaded words in this study is based on Nida's classification of culture elements.Through a selection of some typical expressions in the novel and an analysis of Goldblatt's translation of them from the perspective of cross-cultural communication perspective,the study reaches the following conclusions.Firstly,Goldblatt strikes a balance between fidelity to the original text and the prospective readers' acceptance,establishing a cross-cultural communication bridge between western world and China.Secondly,he utilizes both domestication and foreignization strategies in translating.As for the more typical and repeatedly occurred culture-loaded words,Goldblatt chooses to render them in a foreignizing way,which is beneficial to the promotion of Chinese culture overseas to the largest extent.Meanwhile,for the consideration of the acceptance of the prospective readers,he employs the domestication translation strategy including liberal,omission methods and so on in dealing with the less typical expressions and those that are likely to cause a hamper in comprehension.In doing so,the translation can both promote the Chinese cultural transmission and enrich English expressions.