C-E Translation Of Culture-specific Items Guided By Semantic Translation And Communicative Translation

Culture-specific items pose challenges to translators due to cultural differences,and thus have received much attention from the academia.Due to great differences between Chinese and Western cultures,many culture-specific items heavily loaded with characteristics of Chinese social,historical and political characteristics do not have ready equivalents in English.Therefore,in translating Chinese literary works rich in Chinese cultural elements,keeping the translation faithful to the original text without harsh violation of target readers' expectations in terms of linguistic norm may become a tough quandary to the translator.This report is based on a translation practice conducted during the writer's MTI program at Yangzhou University.The source text consists in chapters selected from We Three,written by Yang Jiang.One remarkable lingua-cultural feature of the source text is its abundant use of culture-specific items.In keeping with the concept of popularizing Chinese literature to the west,this translation practice was conducted with the conceptualization that translating Chinese literature is not merely a translation act but also an opportunity of strengthening China's soft power and promoting its international status.Thus,an attempt at translating this work into English is assumed as a tough but rewarding challenge.In addition,it is hoped that this translation practice and the subsequent report would provide a pertinent platform for research on the application of semantic translation and communicative translation theory to adequate translation of culture-specific items and expressions abundant in classical Chinese prose.This report adopts semantic translation and communicative translation theory put forward by Peter Newmark as its major theoretical guidelines.Semantic Translation attempts to remain the exact contextual meaning of the original text within the original culture while communicative translation is reader-centered and prefers fluent and simple language.Thus,these two translation approaches may seem to contradict each other at first glance.However,actual translation practice proves that when used jointly in a flexible manner in various forms including substitution,and annotation,these two approaches help to effectively handle many difficulties encountered in the translation process.