A Study on The Translation Strategies of Culture-Loaded Words in the English Translation

The term “culture-loaded words” is a sign of national culture, which means that the distinctive national culture is directly or indirectly reflected in the language vocabulary. The purpose of this paper is to examine and analyze the characteristics of the translation strategies used by Howard Goldblatt in his translation The Song of King Gesar, which reflects the unique culture of Chinese ethnic minorities, in order to provide a academic perspective combining qualitative and quantitative research on the translation strategies of culture-loaded words, so as to make a modest contribution to the promotion of linguistic and cultural exchanges between China and the West. According to Nida’s classification criteria of cultural types, culture-loaded words can be divided into five major categories: “economic culture-loaded word, material culture-loaded word, social culture-loaded word, religious culture-loaded word, linguistic culture-loaded word”. At present, most of the studies on the translation methods of culture-loaded words adopt the method of qualitative research, namely analyzing the translation methods of individual translation cases in the research object according to the theory. Therefore, this paper adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to study the culture-loaded words in The Song of King Gesar based on the corpus.