A Study of Translation Strategies about Festival Name in Guangxi

Abstract

China is a multi-ethnic group country with a long history. It is said that each nation has distinctive characteristics and different styles of folk culture. Then festival culture plays a significant role in China’s traditional culture, which all ethnic groups developed for a long time. Guangxi is the region with the largest population of ethnic groups in China. There are common festivals of many ethnic groups and unique festivals of ethnic groups in Guangxi. With the implementation of “Go Global” strategies, more and more Chinese cultures are being exposed to the world. To make foreign friends have a better understanding of the Chinese folk culture, more and more translators begin to translate Chinese folk culture into English.

The author has collected some of the translations of Guangxi festival names, thus making a classification summary. This paper endeavors to study, based on the predecessor, which translation strategies translators should adopt when translating the names of Guangxi festivals. The research findings are as follows: first, in the process of translation, the main translation methods are literal translation, literal translation annotation, free translation, transliteration, and transliteration annotation. Other translation strategies, with the exception of free translation, belong to the foreignization translation strategy. Second, most transliteration methods of festival names are translated into Chinese from local dialects. Through the study of the translation of festival names in Guangxi, this paper concludes that the foreignization translation strategy is mainly adopted for the cultural words with festival characteristics. When there is a huge cultural difference between the original text and the target text, translators often adopt domestication strategies to preserve the cultural connotation so that readers can accept the target text.