Ecological Adaptation and Selection in Translating Huzhou Intangible Cultural Heritage Craft Terms: A Case Study

Abstract

Promoting China’s indigenous intangible cultural heritage (ICH) to the global audience has seen a spurt of progress recently, but empirical work on how translators actually handle traditional craft terms remains scarce. This study takes the local bilingual anthology Huzhou Intangible Cultural Heritage as a case, which examines the translation techniques used for ICH craft terms and the way they relate to the three-dimensional transformations in Eco-translatology. A corpus of 96 ICH craft term pairs was compiled through Python-driven extraction and manual verification. Two re-searchers coded each term independently using Molina and Albir’s taxonomy of translation tech-nique. The results show a clear asymmetry: Linguistic-dimension techniques dominate at 77.1%; cultural-dimension techniques account for 18.7%; communicative techniques appear only margin-ally, amounting to 3.1%. This pattern reflects the referential nature of craft terms. Many denote concrete objects, materials, or procedures that find close equivalents in English, making direct transfer the most economical option. However, when terms carry culturally specific meanings or risk obscurity, translators do resort to cultural elaboration or contextual restructuring. The findings caution against treating ICH translation as a uniform enterprise, and further suggest that ICH term type and semantic properties shape technique distribution, more than abstract principles of cultural preservation alone.