Translation Report Under The Guidance Of Translation Strategies For Culture-Specific Items In The Way Of Whisky: A Journey Around Japanese Whisky(Excerpt)

The introduction and the first chapter are taken as the source text from The Way of Whisky: A Journey Around Japanese Whisky by the famous Scotch whisky expert Dave Broom.These parts mainly describe Dave Broom’s overall perception of Japanese whisky,what he has seen in Fuji-Gotemba and his whisky tasting notes.During the translation practice,the translator finds the prominent feature of the text,which has the large number of culture–specific items,such as whisky brands,types,distillation technology,foreign magazine names and whisky tasting terms.Also,there are a lot of local enterprises,history,geography,and traditional vocabulary.These culture-specific items greatly add to the difficulties of this translation task.Translation,as a means of cross-cultural activity,involves exchange and conversion between two cultures,during which process cultural differences impose one of the biggest difficulties for the translator.The translation of culture-specific items is always one of the problems that need to be elaborately handled by the translators.The most representative definition of culture-specific items is proposed by the Spanish translator,Javier Franco Aixelá.Moreover,the eleven translation strategies of culture-specific items proposed by Aixelá are extremely exhaustive and practical in the translation practice.The translator adopts the translation strategies of Aixelá to research on the culture-specific items in the translation task.The translation strategies proposed by Aixelá are very practical in the process of translation.Eight of them are adopted in this translation practice,namely,repetition,orthographic adaptation,extratextual gloss,intratextual gloss,absolute universalization,naturalization,deletion and autonomous creation.The frequency and importance of the eight translation strategies are summarized with the characteristics of the text.The reasons why the other three translation strategies are not adopted are analyzed as well as their applicability while being translated into Chinese.The translation report analyzes of the application features of translation strategies by examples,with the intention to contribute to the translation studies of culture-specific items.