Translating Chinese Culturally Loaded Words: From The Perspective Of A Self-constructed Parallel Corpus

Over a century,translations opened a window for China to see the rest of the world.However,this transmission of culture was almost unilateral,i.e.from English to Chinese.To promote Chinese culture in the international community and enhance the soft power of China,the National Social Science Fund of China has greatly sponsored translations of Chinese scholars’ researches into English and distribution in the international community.However,the cultural default makes C-E translation difficult.One of the potential difficulties is translating Chinese culturally loaded words into English,which carry the unique characteristics of the Chinese nation.Its translation requires compensation for cultural default and maintenance of literary beauty.Upon being selected to be one of the funded projects,Urban Village Renovation--The Stories of Yangcheng Village was published by Springer,one of the leading publishers of the world.Literature on the definition and classification of culturally loaded words,translation strategies,and parallel corpus were analyzed and summarized to find a clearer definition and better classification of Chinese culturally loaded words and work out the most commonly used translation strategies for them.A clearer definition and a new way of classification were obtained.At the same time,both source and target texts of this academic work were collected and processed for the construction of a Chinese-English parallel corpus.Conforming to the new definition,expressions of culturally loaded words in both source and target texts were extracted from the corpus,and the TXT files of culturally loaded word translation were extracted.Word Smith Tools 8.0 was applied to analyze the lexical features of the translation of Chinese culturally loaded words from the following two aspects: mean word length(in characters)and type/ token ratio.Finally,after corpus analysis,the most commonly-used translation strategies for Chinese culturally loaded words were obtained.The research results show that: 1)Culturally loaded words can be classified into culturespecific and literary expressions by word length,which is beneficial to the selection of translation strategies.2)These culturally loaded words are characterized by their informal styles.The degree of formality is higher than that of novels but lower than that of news texts.From the stylistic perspective,culture-specific expressions are more formal than literary expressions.Translating literary expressions is more difficult than translating culture-specific expressions because the former requires better command of lexical usage.3)Corpus analysis shows that there are five commonly used translation strategies of Chinese culturally loaded words: recognized translation,additions and notes,shifts or transpositions,paraphrase,and semi-transliteration or transliteration.On the basis of defining and classifying culturally loaded words,this thesis analyzes their characteristics from the perspective of lexical features analysis,and proposes some commonly used translation strategies.