A Study On Cultural Inheritance And Translation Of Tea Memes In Guidelines On Tea

Tea culture of the Ming Dynasty functions as a connecting link in the historic continuity of traditional Chinese tea culture.The translation of tea classics is of big significance to the inheritance and dissemination of tea culture memes.Guided by Richard Dawkins’ s theory of memetics,this thesis takes the original Chinese tea classic of Guidelines on Tea(Cha Jie),written by Luo Lin in the Ming Dynasty,and its English version as the case of study objects to analyze and explore the transmission,characteristics,and translation techniques of tea memes.The theory of memetics expounds on the transmission mechanism of memes as culture replicators in different hosts.Components of language as a kind of meme can also achieve their own replication,reproduction,optimization,and development through various modes,providing a prerequisite for cultural inheritance.Since the appearance of the world’s first tea book The Classic of Tea(Cha Jing)written by Lu Yu in the Tang Dynasty,Chinese tea memes contained in tea classics had been emerging from the Tang,Song up to the Ming Dynasty,and a certain scale of tea meme pool gradually took form.Taking The Classic of Tea as the Mothertext,this thesis tries to study the transmission and replication modes by comparing tea memes in this book with those collected from Guidelines on Tea,in order to further explore the basic development path and replication mode of tea memes from Tang to Ming.On the basis of this,the paper intends to get more insight into how the tea memes in the two classics have achieved intertextual and cross lingual survival,reproduction,and development via proper translation techniques from the lexical and syntactic levels.The Ming Dynasty is one of the heydays in the development of Chinese tea culture,with a bigger number of tea books written in this period than in any other dynasties in China.The development and innovation of tea memes have also been raised in the Ming tea classics.Therefore,the collection,collation,and analysis of these memes can help make up for the deficiency of the current research and external transmission of tea books in the Ming Dynasty,ensuring the continuity and integrity of the research on tea culture.In the same way,the summary and analysis of the corresponding translation techniques may also provide more ideas and new cases for the standardized translation of other tea classics.The ultimate purpose is to help the external dissemination of the memes in the Chinese tea culture.The study shows that tea memes in Cha Jie,following the same way as those in Cha Jing,could achieve native and cross-cultural communication through both internal and external transmission modes.In internal circulation,full replication,partial replication,and nonreplication are the major modes.Such tea memes are endowed with historical,complex,scientific,and cultural characteristics.As for external circulation,different translation techniques have been adopted to help memes win greater acceptance by the new host of the rendered language,such as transliteration,annotation,paraphrase,addition,omission,correspondence,and integration,so as to promote the survival and development of tea memes in the target text.