On The Translation Strategies For Culture-Specific Items

This thesis selects from Tales of Fujian edited by Li Xiaojie three chapters for the translation project of the thesis.The three chosen chapters introduce arguably the three most famous tourist attractions and features of Fujian and contain a large number of culture-specific items(CSIs).The thesis summarizes the four most common categories of CSIs that appear in the translation project:idioms,architectural terms,religious terms,and mythical references.For the translation of CSIs,Eirlys E.Davies proposed seven strategies:Preservation,Addition,Omission,Globalization,Localization,Transformation,and Creation.The thesis analyzes the translation strategies used for each of the four categories of CSIs with examples from Tales of Fujian and summarizes the translation strategies that each category tends to use in this project.According to the thesis' case analysis,the following modifications of Davies'taxonomy of translation strategies may be necessary in the case of Chinese-English translation:(1)The procedure of repetition should be excluded from the category of preservation;(2)the procedure of transliteration should be specifically listed under the category of preservation;(3)the combination of transliteration and literal translation should be added to the category of preservation;and(4)the category of addition should be divided into extratextual addition and intratextual addition.The case analysis also demonstrates that,in this translation project,literal translation and globalization are the main translation strategies for idioms,preservation and addition for architectural terms,and addition for Buddhist terms.In terms of translating the mythical references,which are mostly mythical figures in this project,the translator has the following choices:preservation(transliteration,and literal translation),and addition.To sum up,for the four categories of CSIs in this translation project,the most frequently applied strategies are preservation and addition,followed by globalization.Due to the lack of examples of omission,transformation,and creation,the thesis does not include the three strategies in the chapter of case analysis.