Abstract
Culture-loaded words, with distinct cultural features, lead to lexical gaps for linguistic memes during transmission, which brings daunting challenges to interpreters. Despite various earlier studies of culture-loaded words conducted mainly from the perspective of functional equivalence, relevance theory, interpretive theory or ecological translatology, few are carried out from the perspective of linguistic memetics. For that reason, this paper constructs a Chinese-English interpreting corpus. Based on the corpus analysis method, it first retrieves all qualified culture-loaded words and classifies them into three categories from the perspective of linguistic memetics according to their representation information and content: form-meaning compound culture-loaded words (FMCWs), pronunciation derived culture-loaded words (PDWs) and culture-loaded words derived from morphological structures (MSDWs). Then it explores the interpreting strategies adopted for all culture-loaded words under the guidance of linguistic memetics, and finally summarizes the main interpreting strategies of FMCWs, PDWs, and MSDWs respectively on the basis of applied frequencies. The result shows that our study, compared with predecessors, presents more targeted and practical solutions for interpreters and brings fresh perspective for further studies.
Highlights
Based on the corpus analysis method, it first retrieves all qualified culture-loaded words and classifies them into three categories from the perspective of linguistic memetics according to their representation information and content: form-meaning compound culture-loaded words (FMCWs), pronunciation derived culture-loaded words (PDWs) and culture-loaded words derived from morphological structures (MSDWs)
The present study, classifies culture-loaded words in the sub-corpus into three categories according to their representation information and content: form-meaning compound culture-loaded words (FMCWs), pronunciation derived cultureloaded words (PDWs) and culture-loaded words derived from morphological structures (MSDWs)
FMCWs refer to the culture-loaded words with strong reproduction ability both in language form and content, including general terms used in a certain period, idioms, set phrases, proverbs, etc
Summary
Baker (2000) proposed that the concepts expressed by some words in the source language are completely unfamiliar to the target audience These concepts are either abstract, such as words reflecting religious beliefs or social customs, or are specific, such as special local snacks. Remarkable progress has been made in previous studies on culture-loaded words from the perspective of memetics, though the classification of culture-loaded words either applied the idea of Nida (1998) or He et al (2014). The former classified culture-loaded words into five categories, namely ecological culture-loaded words, material culture-loaded words, social culture-loaded words, religious culture-loaded words and linguistic culture-loaded words. Despite a solid foundation it has laid for subsequent studies, that classification only focused on the cultural information of culture-loaded words and offered limited guidance for interpreting
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