A Comparative Study on the Translation of Culture-Specific Items in Yueyang Tower — A Case Study of Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang’s and Luo Jingguo’s English Translations
Aug 2026· Journal of Research in Social Science And Humanities· Vol 5, pp. 95-100· 0 citations· 9 references
Abstract
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.
— This paper compares Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang’s 1953 translation and Julia Lovell’s 2009 translation of The True Story of Ah Q to examine how translators construct Chinese cultural identity in cross-cultural communication. Drawing on the cultural perspective in translation studies and narrative construction theory, this study examines how translators’ identities and historical contexts inform their strategic choices. Findings show that Yangs ’ version employs cultural amplification and foreignization, emphasizing the depth and scholarly value of Chinese culture, in line with the nation’s early cultural diplomacy. Lovell’s version favors reduction and domestication, prioritizing readability and literary appeal within a globalized market. The study demonstrates that translation is not merely linguistic transfer but a vital practice of cultural identity reconstruction.
Yi-Wen Li· International Journal of Lan...· 0 citations
Domestication and foreignization are two common strategies for translators to deal with cultural differences. Based on Berman’s translation ethics and twelve deformations, this paper takes Bai Juyi’s the Everlasting Regret (selected sentences) as the object of study, adopts close reading and comparative analysis, and selects the English versions of Xu Yuanchong, Xu Zhongjie and W. J. B. Fletcher for comparative analysis, focusing on the different degrees of domestication and foreignization in the aspects of word choice, syntax, rhetorical organization, cultural transmission and so on, as well as the effects caused by these differences. The study found that in the English translation of classical Chinese poetry, in addition to the necessary domestication adjustment, the translator should retain the cultural background and aesthetic logic of the original poem as much as possible, so that the translation can achieve the purpose of conveying the cultural nature of this special literary genre. Therefore, in the English translation, foreignization enjoys ethical priority.
Chenfan Wang· English Language Teaching an...· 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
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.
Bo-Han Zhou, Dan Cui· Communication Society and Me...· 0 citations
Urban international promotional films serve as core media for cross-cultural regional communication, and the quality of English subtitles directly determines overseas audiences’ acceptance of local culture. Taking Huzhou’s tourism promotional film Beautiful China, Dynamic Huzhou as research corpus, this paper constructs a three-dimensional analytical framework based on Relevance Theory, including cognitive context adaptation, ostensive-inferential optimization and optimal relevance focus. Six targeted translation methods are summarized through typical subtitle cases. This study verifies the explanatory power of Relevance Theory for promotional subtitling, and supplies operable translation strategies to balance cultural dissemination and readers’ cognitive processing effort.
Yuhang Zheng, Yishu Zhuang· International Journal of Edu...· 0 citations
Honglou meng, the eighteenth-century Chinese novel by Cao Xueqin, stands as one of the greatest achievements in world literature. Its translation into English has produced two major complete versions: David Hawkes and John Minford's The Story of the Stone (1973–1986) and Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang's A Dream of Red Mansions (1978–1980). These two translations embody fundamentally different translation philosophies. Drawing on Lawrence Venuti's concepts of domestication and foreignization as the primary theoretical framework and supported by Eugene Nida's equivalence theory and Peter Newmark's translation procedures, this paper undertakes a systematic comparative analysis of the two versions across four key textual dimensions: culture-specific items, names and appellations, poetic discourse, and religious and philosophical terminology. The analysis reveals that the Hawkes-Minford version consistently adopts a domesticating strategy, rendering Chinese cultural elements into familiar English forms to maximize readability for the Anglophone reader. In contrast, the Yangs' version follows a predominantly foreignizing approach, preserving the strangeness of the source text and requiring greater cultural effort from its audience. Neither strategy is inherently superior; rather, each serves different readerships and reflects distinct historical and ideological contexts. The paper concludes by arguing that the coexistence of these two approaches enriches the English-language reception of Honglou meng and offers enduring insights for the translation of classical Chinese literature.
Guo Nyuhuan· International Journal of Hum...· 0 citations