Translation of Culture-Specific Items from the Perspective of “New Northeast Literature”: A Case Study of the English Translation of Moses on the Plain
Jul 2026· Communication Society and Media· 0 citations
Abstract
This thesis aims to investigate the translation strategies for culture-specific items in the English translation of Moses on the Plain, a representative work of “New Northeast Literature”, so as to provide a practical reference for the overseas reception of contemporary regional Chinese literature. Adopting Aixelá’s theory of culture-specific items as the core framework and incorporating the cultural classification models of Newmark and Nida, the study selects typical examples from four dimensions—ecological, material, social, and linguistic culture—for analysis. The thesis shows that the translator tends to employ retention strategies such as transliteration and literal translation for ecological culture-specific items; the absolute universalization strategy for material culture-specific items; a combination of literal translation and absolute universalization for social culture-specific items; and free translation and functional equivalence for linguistic culture-specific items. Overall, the translator seeks a balance between “cultural authenticity” and “reader acceptability”, prioritizing the readability and communicative intent of the target text.
Literary translation involves more than linguistic conversion; it also entails the reconstruction and re-encoding of cultural meanings. From the perspective of cultural translation theory, this study takes Liu Cixin’s original Chinese novel The Three-Body Problem and its Spanish translation El problema de los tres cuerpos by Javier Altayó as the objects of analysis. Drawing on Nida’s framework of cultural classification, culturally embedded elements in the source text are grouped into five categories: ecological, material, social, religious-philosophical, and linguistic. Through a comparative reading of the Chinese and Spanish versions, the paper examines the translator’s shifting strategies among foreignization, domestication, and cultural negotiation. The analysis suggests that the translation does not rely on a single or fixed strategy. When dealing with culture-specific elements that carry strong historical or regional specificity, the translator is more likely to preserve foreignness through transliteration, literal translation, or brief explanatory additions. In contrast, for expressions that may hinder comprehension or lead to cultural misinterpretation, freer rendering, generalization, or contextual adjustment tend to be adopted in order to reduce the cognitive burden on target readers. Overall, the Spanish translation of The Three-Body Problem reveals a flexible negotiation process, in which cultural difference is retained to varying degrees while comprehension is facilitated and narrative flow is maintained. This case offers a useful reference for the Spanish dissemination of Chinese science fiction and more broadly for the cross-cultural transmission of heterogenous cultural elements.
Yueyang Zhang· Journal of Language, Culture...· 0 citations
Documentary is an important medium for the overseas dissemination of culture. Therefore, subtitle translation in documentaries has made the translation of culture-loaded words a significant topic in translation studies. This paper takes the documentary Journeys in Nature: The Ewenki Series as its research subject, analyzing the subtitle translation of culture-loaded words within the framework of domestication and foreignization. It explores the translation strategies for different types of culture-loaded words and their intercultural communication effects. The findings reveal that foreignization is predominantly adopted for place names among ecological culture-loaded words and domestication is employed for linguistic and social culture-loaded words. Meanwhile, the translation of material culture-loaded words demonstrates great flexibility. Overall, the documentary exhibits a strategic preference for domestication supplemented by foreignization, offering a reference for the subtitle translation of documentaries on ethnic minorities and the international dissemination of Chinese culture.
Wen Sun· Studies in Linguistics and L...· 0 citations
In the current context of accelerating the spread of Chinese traditional culture, the translation of culture-loaded terms has become a key issue in the study of translation and intercultural communication. Based on the analysis framework of translation compensation theory, this study takes the column of “24 Solar Terms” in China Daily as the corpus, and systematically explores the translation methods of culture-loaded words in this column. According to the four categories of ecology, material, society and language, this study examines how translators compensate for cultural loss and information loss in translation. The results show that the translator widely adopts compensation techniques such as free translation, amplification, transliteration and annotation, and logical explicitation, which effectively improves the understanding smoothness and text acceptance of the target readers while maintaining the cultural connotation of the source language. These strategies not only ensure the faithful transmission of cultural information, but also effectively promote the overseas dissemination of Chinese excellent traditional culture. It is expected that the research results can provide useful reference for the Chinese-English translation practice of culture-loaded words in similar publicity texts in the future.
Zhiming Jiang, Mengyu Wang· Scientific Journal Of Humani...· 0 citations
As Chinese culture “goes global,” political documents have become a key medium for external communication. Taking the official English version of the 19th CPC National Congress Report as its corpus, this paper applies Javier Franco Aixelá’s eleven strategies for translating culture-specific items (CSIs) to the analysis of culture-loaded words and phrases. It further examines these strategies from the perspectives of domestication and foreignization, exploring how to minimize the limits of translatability and maximize translation acceptability so that China’s political message is accurately and effectively conveyed to international audiences.
Tingting Dong· Scientific Journal Of Humani...· 0 citations
Against the backdrop of globalization and the “going global” of Chinese culture, the English translation of museum cultural relics acts as an important carrier for the cross-cultural communication of regional culture. As a core platform for the display of Chu culture, the quality of English translations of cultural relics in Hubei Provincial Museum directly influences the international communication effect of the distinctive culture in the Yangtze River Basin. Supported by Skopos theory of the German functionalist translation approach, this paper conducts a case analysis of the English translations of typical cultural relics such as bronzes, ceramics and lacquered wooden artifacts in the museum, centering on the three principles of the skopos rule, the coherence rule and the fidelity rule. This paper shows that the museum’s translations generally achieve a balance between information transmission and linguistic standardization, but there are still problems such as the lack of key information, mistranslation of culture-loaded words and inconsistent translation of craft terms. Looking at both positive and negative translation examples, this paper puts forward an optimization strategy that’s guided by communication goals, balances cultural authenticity and natural English phrasing. It can give practical pointers for standardizing the English translation of Hubei Provincial Museum’s cultural relics, plus provide solid empirical support for the translation of promotional materials about unique cultural content from local museums.
Fei-Fei Mao, Yang Liu· Journal of Education and Cul...· 0 citations
Yueyang Tower is a famous piece of classical Chinese prose, and it contains many culture-specific items. Using Aixelá’s theory of culture-specific items and Nida’s cultural classification, this paper makes a comparison of the translation strategies in the English versions by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang and by Luo Jingguo, focusing on ecological, social and spiritual culture-specific items. The comparison shows that the Yangs kept the cultural images and sentence structures of the original text, while Luo used free translation, put fluency and readability first, and added notes to explain cultural information. These different choices came from different translation purposes and target readers, so the two versions achieved different degrees of balance between keeping cultural meaning and helping readers understand.
Ziqi Zhou, Li Liu· Journal of Research in Socia...· 0 citations
