A Study Of The Text-less Back Translation Of Culture-specific Items From The Perspective Of Construal Theory

Text-less back translation refers to translating a text from a foreign language depicting a country’s culture back into the language of that country.The Good Earth is an English novel with a Chinese theme,and translating it into Chinese is a text-less back translation.How to accurately translate and restore Chinese culture-specific items is a difficulty in current research on text-less translation.It requires that the translation not only accurately understand the meaning of the original text,but also take into account the acceptability of the target readers who have the same cultural background as the original text to realize the meaning of the original text.This point is consistent with cognitive linguistics.According to cognitive linguistics,the cognitive essence of translation is the transformation or the reconstruction of construal,and the realization of the meaning of the original text mainly depends on the construal reconstructed or transformed in the translation.Therefore,the theory of construal provides a unique and effective interpretative perspective for the translation process.This thesis takes the Chinese culture-specific items in The Good Earth as the research object and adopts quantitative and qualitative research methods to compare the meanings of the source text and the translated text from four dimensions(scope and background,perspective,prominence,and specificity),and thus explore the translation methods and skills for the Chinese culture-specific items in The Good Earth,aiming to provide new insights for the text-less back translation of the culture-specific items.Based on Nida’s culture classification,these culture-specific items are divided into social culture-specific items(73cases),linguistic culture-specific items(38 cases),religious culture-specific items(28 cases),material culture-specific items(56 cases),and ecological culture-specific items(29 cases),totaling 220 cases.Then case studies are conducted by category.In addition,descriptive statistics on the translation methods and skills for Chinese culture-specific items in Wang Fengzhen’s version are shown in a table.It is found that: 1)in the process of text-less back translation of social culture-specific items,free translation,and literal translation are commonly used;2)in the process of text-less back translation of linguistic culture-specific items,free translation,literal translation,and shift are dominated;3)in the process of text-less back translation of religious culture items,free translation and literal translation are employed more often;4)in the process of back translation of material culture-specific items,the literal translation is preferred;5)in the process of text-less back translation of ecological culture-specific items,the prevailing methods are free translation and literal translation.The results show that free translation accounts for 51.79%,literal translation accounts for 38.84%,omission accounts for 1.34%,addition accounts for 0.89%,variation translation accounts for 2.23%,and shift accounts for5.36%.Therefore,free translation,literal translation,and shift are commonly used.Besides,the objective deficiencies in Wang Fengzhen’s translation of The Good Earth lie in two points: 1)When some religious culture-specific items are back-translated,the translation cannot better conform to the cognitive experience of the target readers;2)When some material and social culture-specific items are back-translated,the translation can not better return the meaning correctly.Therefore,in the process of text-less back translation of culture-specific items,if the Chinese culture-specific items in the original text adopt the domesticating strategy,the translation can replace the construal of the readers of the original text with the construal of target readers,which may involve free translation and shift;if the Chinese culture-specific items in the source text adopt the foreignization strategy,the translation can correspond to the construal of the source text in the process of text-less back translation,which may involve literal translation.So,the construal reconstructed in the translated text needs to be appropriately adjusted according to the cognitive experience and language habits of target readers.In this way,the meaning of the original text could be better realized.