The Fusion Of Horizons In Zhang Guangqian’s And Cyril Birch’s English Translations Of The Culture-specific Items In Mu Dan Ting

This thesis takes the Fusion of Horizons of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and intercultural interpretations of the Fusion of Horizons as the theoretical guidance,and Cyril Birch’s and Zhang Guangqian’s English translated versions of Mu Dan Ting as the research objects.According to the different horizons,the horizon gaps and two phases of the Fusion of Horizons,this thesis makes a comparative analysis of Zhang’s and Birch’s English translations of the culture-specific items in Mu Dan Ting,intending to address the following two research questions: How are the two translators Zhang Guangqian and Cyril Birch influenced by different horizons in their translations of the culture-specific items in Mu Dan Ting? How do the two translators mediate the different horizons to achieve the Fusion of Horizons in their translations of the culture-specific items in Mu Dan Ting?The careful comparative study of Zhang’s and Birch’s English translations of the culture-specific items in Mu Dan Ting reveals the following major findings: firstly,in their translations of the culture-specific items in Mu Dan Ting,both Zhang and Birch are influenced by the historical horizon of Mu Dan Ting,their current horizons and English cultural horizon.Secondly,both of the two translators tend to adopt conservative strategies such as extratextual gloss and linguistic translation to approach the horizon of the source text.When they mediate the horizon gap between the source-text horizon and the English cultural horizon,in most cases,Birch’s translation is too confined to the literal meanings of the source text,making his translation of CSIs difficult to be fused into the cultural horizon of the target language.Compared with Birch’s translation strategies applied in his English version of Mu Dan Ting,Zhang’s are more flexible,and he achieves a better effect in the Fusion of Horizons through better mediation of the horizon gap between the source text and the target language culture.Based on the above research findings,the author of this thesis provides three suggestions for how to achieve the Fusion of Horizons on the English translation of the culture-specific items in Chinese classics,including the corresponding translation strategies for the translation of different culture-specific items,the combined application of conservation and substitution translation strategies,and two principles of annotations.It is hoped that this thesis can provide some reference for the English translation of culture-specific items in Chinese classics and promote the spread of the Chinese culture to the English-speaking countries.