Translating the Chinese Cultural Other

Abstract

Yan Lianke's critically acclaimed novel Shouhuo (Lenin's Kisses in English) features, among others, inventive use of regional dialect and a series of language and cultural notes. Embodying the Chinese cultural other, these dialect and cultural terms and phrases might pose a challenge to the translator and the success of the English edition depends much on their translation. Drawing on Gideon Toury's initial norm theory and Javier Franco Aixelá’s taxonomy of translation strategies for treating culture-specific items, this chapter aims to examine Carlos Rojas's translation of these difficult terms and phrases. A quantitative analysis was manually conducted based on the data consisting of 100 Chinese terms and 100 Chinese phrases with their English renderings. The results show that on the whole Rojas tries to strike a balance between adequacy-oriented translation and acceptability-oriented translation, though he is predisposed to preserve the cultural significance of these terms. The qualitative analysis with reference to specific examples demonstrates that Rojas translates the Chinese culture-specific items flexibly and resourcefully, often transcending the binary opposition between foreignization and domestication. Driven by his professional habitus as a scholar-translator, his pursuit of adequacy in cultural translation offers English readers an opportunity to interact with the Chinese cultural other.