Translation Strategies of Culture-Specific Items and Cultural Identity: A Case Study on William A. Lyell’s Translation of “Diary of a Madman”

Abstract

Since the cultural turn in translation studies was proposed, researchers have focused on the cultural elements in the translation. How to construct cultural identity needs to be taken into consideration. Meanwhile, culture-specific items (hereafter, CSIs) are one of the most difficult issues for translators, especially in literary translation. Researchers have put forward different translation strategies to solve the problems of CSIs and explored the use of those strategies in specific textual materials. This work probed the strategies employed in the translation of CSIs in William A. Lyell’s English version of “Diary of a Madman” based on Aixelá’s model and their effect on the construction of Chinese cultural identity. The results demonstrated that the most frequent strategy was linguistic (non-cultural) translation, followed by absolute universalization. In addition, conservation methods were more helpful in constructing cultural identity than substitution approaches.