A Corpus Based Study On The Translation Of Culture-loaded Words In Happy Dreams

Taking sufferings of farmers in the rural area as its theme,Chinese local literature has become an extremely important school in Chinese literature.Gaoxing created by Jia Pingwa is a representative work of local literature.It tells the fate of some scavengers in the city and expresses his concern about their life plight and spiritual world.Its English version Happy Dreams translated by Nicky Harman(Han Bin)is a great success.The description of Shaanxi scenery and the use of dialect have become the highlights of the novel,while the translation of culture-loaded words has become a maj or difficulty.This research explores the translation of all types of culture-loaded words under the classification of ecological,material,social,religious and miscellaneous culture so as to summarize the general strategy tendency for translating local culture.For this purpose,a bilingual parallel corpus was built of all the culture-loaded words and their translation and the strategies and methods were manually annotated.On the basis of corpus statistics,some qualitative analysis was made of typical translation examples and the reasons behind the translation strategy.It is concluded that the general translation strategy is neutralization and the reasons are the translator’s thoughts,her attitude towards Chinese culture and the influence of patronage.Exploring the translation strategies and methods of culture-loaded words in Happy Dreams can not only provide some references for the translation of local literature,but also bring some inspirations for Chinese local literature to go out.