A Comparative Study on the Translation of Culture-Specific Items in Yueyang Tower — A Case Study of Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang’s and Luo Jingguo’s English Translations

Abstract

Yueyang Tower is a famous piece of classical Chinese prose, and it contains many culture-specific items. Using Aixelá’s theory of culture-specific items and Nida’s cultural classification, this paper makes a comparison of the translation strategies in the English versions by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang and by Luo Jingguo, focusing on ecological, social and spiritual culture-specific items. The comparison shows that the Yangs kept the cultural images and sentence structures of the original text, while Luo used free translation, put fluency and readability first, and added notes to explain cultural information. These different choices came from different translation purposes and target readers, so the two versions achieved different degrees of balance between keeping cultural meaning and helping readers understand.