A Study Of The English Translation Of Culture-loaded Terms In Wo Bu Shi Pan-Jinlian From The Perspective Of Sociosemiotics

How to translate culture-loaded terms is one of the biggest challenges in translation studies.These terms are usually rich in cultural connotations,because they are embedded in history and are a reflection of various aspects of human life.In most cases,they can express complex meanings in an aesthetic manner.Many researchers,both domestically and internationally,have been dedicated to the study of translating culture-loaded terms as equivalents of these terms are barely found between different languages.Translation is a process of encoding and decoding various signs in written language.These signs are inextricably linked to the cultural and historical background exclusive in each society.Thus,theories in sociosemiotics,a study on signs in the social and cultural context,can provide some insights for the study on translation of culture-loaded terms.For example,Nida first introduced the sociosemiotic approach to translation studies,and he emphasized the preservation of the three semiotic meanings in the translation:designative meaning,linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning.Chen Hongwei followed Nida’s suit and further expanded the sociosemiotic approach to translation studies.She reasoned that translation involves a transfer of codes between two or multiple languages.Based on Nida’s approach,she also requested the preservation of language functions and the need to take cultural and social context into consideration.Therefore,Chen proposed two guiding principles:correspondence in meaning and similarity in function.Following these principles,the sociosemiotic approach to translation studies can reduce the loss of meaning and function that may arise due to cultural differences to some extent.Taking Howard Goldblatt and his wife Sylvia Li-chun’s translation of Liu Zhenyun’s novel Wo Bu Shi Pan-Jinlian《我不是潘金莲》as the research material,this study intends to investigate the strategies and the methods in translation of culture-loaded terms,and to evaluate the translation quality based on Chen’s two guiding principles and the sociosemiotic theory and to evaluate the reproduction of the designative,linguistic and pragmatic meanings of the original and the representation of the expressive,informative and aesthetic functions of the source text.It can be concluded that in most cases,the deep designative,linguistic and pragmatic meanings of culture-loaded terms have been successfully recreated without inflicting losses on the readability of the text for the target readers.The translators(Howard couple)can employ a combination of literal and free translation methods(i.e.domestication and foreignization)to properly handle each culture-loaded term.But there are a small number of cases in which some cultural images have been removed or transferred.However,the translators failed to take advantage of footnotes or endnotes to add necessary explanations or background information.Even though such handling hinders the introduction and further spread of classical Chinese culture to the international circle and deprives the target readers’ opportunity to familiarize Chinese culture,but it is actually able to facilitate the readability of the text.In short,the translation is found to be exemplary and offers a solution to the problem of how to translate culture-loaded terms in contemporary Chinese literature.Meanwhile,the sociosemiotic approach to translation accurately captures the key to the translation of culture-loaded terms and can be applied as a guide to evaluate translation quality,regardless of some limitations which should be addressed in future works.