Chinese-English Translation Strategies For Culture-specific Items:a Case Study Of Broken Wings

Culture-specific items embody the unique culture of a language community.Due to their rich cultural connotations and specific cultural references,translation problems arise from their transference to a different language.As one of the leading figures of Chinese local literature,Jia Pingwa has been getting more and more attention overseas.Featuring folk language,his works are abundant in culture-specific items,and Broken Wings(《极花》)is no exception.The novel was published in 2016,and its English translation by Nicky Harman was published in 2019.It tells the tragic story of a young girl who is trafficked and sold to a farmer in a remote Shaanxi rural village.It vividly depicts the various aspects of local culture,containing all kinds of culture-specific items.Javier Franco Aixelá proposed eleven strategies to translate culture-specific items,including five conservation strategies and six substitution strategies.He divided culturespecific items into proper nouns and common expressions.With reference to Nida’s five kinds of cultural problems,the author draws on Aixelá’s classification and summarized six categories of culture-specific items in Broken Wings:proper nouns,ecological culturespecific items,material culture-specific items,social culture-specific items,religious culture-specific items,and linguistic culture-specific items.Under such a classification system,Aixelá’s theories are applied to analyze the translation of culture-specific items in Broken Wings.The author combines quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the 909 culturespecific items collected.Through data analysis and case analysis,it is found that in Harman’s translation,conservation strategies account for 62.71%and substitution strategies account for 37.29%.The most commonly used translation strategies are linguistic translation,absolute universalization,and naturalization,accounting for 55.12%,21.12%,and 11.11%respectively.For the translation of proper nouns,the cultural references of the culturespecific items are rarely substituted,with linguistic translation and orthographic adaptation adopted most frequently.Linguistic translation is the dominant strategy for the translation of ecological culture-specific items,material culture-specific items,and social culturespecific items.For these three categories,as the transparency of the culture-specific items reduces,the percentage of substitution strategies gradually increases.The substitution strategies used are mainly absolute universalization and naturalization.In terms of religious culture-specific items,although the complexity of translation problems rises,Harman adopts conservation strategies extensively,with linguistic translation accounting for 53.33%.Substitution strategies are only dominant in linguistic culture-specific items,where both linguistic translation and absolute universalization are applied frequently to be loyal both to the author’s intentions and target readers.Studying the translation of culture-specific items is of great importance to find possible ways to bridge the cultural gaps in translation.Hopefully,the analysis of culture-specific item translation strategies in this study is conducive to the going-global of Chinese literature.