A Study On Cultural Back Translation Of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers

In recent years,the number of researches on Chinese diaspora fictions in translation studies is escalating.In order to fit in,Chinese diaspora authors have to write in a non-native language.The dual linguistic and cultural backgrounds aggravate the uniqueness of its back translation.Guo Xiaolu,a young Chinese British female writer,created A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers on the basis of her experience of studying in Britain.With the form of a dictionary,the book tells the story of Zhuang Xiaoqiao,a 23-year-old Chinese girl coming from her hometown of Wenzhou,studying,living,experiencing love and discovering herself in London.As soon as it has been published,the book was nominated for multiple awards in successive years,in which the gradual improving language shows the growth process of the protagonist,and Chinese culture penetrated in the collision and exchange of Chinese and Western cultures.This study takes Guo Xiaolu?s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and Miao Ying?s Chinese translation as the research objects.Based on the perspective of “cultural back translation”,quantitative,qualitative and case-analytical research methods are used to discuss and analyze language features,language changing process,and back translation of Chinese cultural elements.At the beginning of the novel,the author uses Chinglish,Chinese-English mixture,and Pinyin,finally she writes in correct English.In this paper,the language features are summarized and categorized into lexical,morphological and syntactic features.It is found that the translator adopts strategies of translating some of wrong English sentences into correct ones,maintaining mistakes in English version;and translating correct English sentences into wrong ones and diachronic analysis is conducted.The frequency and proportion of the second,middle to the last three chapters are 17%,3%,and 1% respectively;while the translator?s ratio of retention is 0.1%,0.04%,and 0.1% correspondingly,which shows Chinese translation does not reflect the language changing process.This article also divides the Chinese cultural elements into linguistic cultural elements,social cultural elements and political cultural elements,which are translated by variant methods such as addition,omission,transliteration,and are basically brought back to the original cultural environment by the translator.Exploring restoration of linguistic features and cultural elements in Miao Ying?s Chinese version will not only serve as a good reference for future translation,but also stimulate reflection on the imperfection of back translation theory of Chinese diaspora literature.Through analysis,it is found that Miao Ying?s Chinese version fails to deliver language features and the changing process at linguistic level,while it brings the language into Chinese culture at cultural level,as far as the author considered,although translator tries to approach language features of source text,the plots of the novel makes it impossible to be satisfied both at linguistic level and cultural level.As for cultural back translation of Chinese elements,the Chinese version realized the cultural back-feeding of Chinese culture and basically met the standards of language,style and culture of cultural back translation.This study explores restoration of language and culture in the Chinese version,emphasizing that linguistic back translation is an important connotation of cultural back translation,so as to complete the theory of “cultural back translation”.Due to the limited ability,the author hopes to draw attention from more scholars to the peculiarity of cultural back translation of Chinese diaspora literature and to further rich the back translation theory related to it.