Innovation Humanities and Social Sciences Research (IHSSR)

Publisher:ISCCAC

A Study of the French Translation Strategy of High-frequency Culture-loaded Terms in The Analects of Confucius Based on Corpus
Authors

Minghao Chen

Corresponding Author

Minghao Chen

Publishing Date

27 Feb. 2023

Keywords

The Analects of Confucius, Translation strategy, Culture-loaded terms, Corpus.

Abstract

Culture-loaded terms are words, phrases and idioms that signify something specific to a certain culture. The Analects of Confucius, a masterpiece of Confucianism, contains a large number of Chinese culture-loaded terms in its condensed language. This paper uses corpus software to statistically analyze the high-frequency culture-loaded terms in The Analects of Confucius, and to compare and explore the translation of the high-frequency culture-loaded terms in the three translations based on a bilingual parallel corpus of The Analects of Confucius in Chinese and French. The results of the study show that the three French translations have chosen the strategy of translating culture-loaded terms with domestication as the main focus and foreignization as a supplement, which has reduced the reading difficulty of the French version of the ancient Chinese text. However, for some representative cultural words, such as "ren" and "wen", some translators have adopted the strategy of foreignization and transliteration, supplemented by annotation or explanation, in order to preserve, supplement and introduce Chinese cultural information.

Copyright

© 2023, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license