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Bewitched or Befogged in a Magical World? : Chinese Translations of Culture-Specific Items in a Harry Potter Novel

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Date

2006

Authors

Shaio, Yah-Ying Elaine

Supervisor

Crezee, Ineke
Holt, Ron

Item type

Thesis

Degree name

Master of Arts

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Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

The present research concerns the translation of the Culture-Specific Items (CSI) from the original English version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban into two renditions, a Mainland Chinese version and a Taiwanese version. CSI translations involves not only the transmission of language but also that of culture. IN this research, the writer seeks to establish how the two professional translators dealt with the four areas of CSIs in the relevant translations. These four areas are: characters names, place/shop names, charms/magic formulae, and magical creatures. These are the elements that are important in constructing the background and atmosphere of the story, and sometimes carry cultural or language specific connotations that are difficult to translate. The researcher analyses the CSI translation strategies used by the two translators on the basis of a new categorisation, based on previous researchers' taxonomies. By analysing both quantitative and qualitative data, the thesis writer was concerned with how these CSIs were translated into the two versions, whether the two versions tend to be source-text or target-text oriented, and how the connotations of the originals were conveyed in the target texts. The study found that the translation of proper names, such as character names and shop/place names, was more conservative, which may have been due to Chinese translation conventions. The renderings of these two groups of CSIs showed a significant tendency toward the preservation of the original sounds. By comparison, substitutive strategies were used more frequently in the translation of magic formulae and magical creatures than in the translation of character names and shop/place names. Findings of this research also indicated that even though both translators preferred conservative strategies in most cases, the Taiwanese translator seemed to have adopted substitutive strategies in a slightly larger number of cases than the Mainland Chinese translator. At the end of this thesis, some possible explanations of the differences found between translations of the two versions are presented, followed by some suggestions for further studies.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10292/19656

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