Translation Of Cultural Allusions From The Perspective Of Thick Translation

The concept of"thick translation" was originated from "thick description".It was established by American scholar Appiah,and later developed theoretically and practically by many Western and Chinese scholars.The author of this paper translated four essays written by Alain de Botton.Due to the frequent cultural allusions in those essays,the thick translation strategy was adopted.Thus,the paper was written from the perspective of thick translation.It first clarifies the definition and features of thick translations according to previous researches.Then it utilizes ten examples chosen from the Chinese translation of those four essays to illustrate the proper use of four different ways of thick translation:explicit annotation,implicit annotation,trans-writing and adding preface.Last,it summarizes the situations where the four ways can apply respectively,how to apply,and how to adjust the amount of annotation according to specific context,etc.In short,explicit annotation provides information about cultural allusions which do not affect understanding too much;implicit annotation and trans-writing both provide necessary information which is essential to readers' understanding of the context,but,compared to implicit annotation,trans-writing more often restructures and reorganizes the original text information,as is put in the front of an article,provides an overall picture of the complex background.