A Study on the Strategies for Translating Place Names in Lingnan Folk Tales with the Perspective of Eco-translatology

Lingnan folk tales reflect the folk customs of the Lingnan region. The places involved in the tales are named in various ways, either reflecting the geographical location, or reflecting the people’s livelihood. Taking the differences in language and culture between Chinese and English into consideration, this paper analyzes the eco-translatology theory and several general strategies for translating the place names in China into English before applying the framework constructed by the language dimension, the culture dimension and the communication dimension from the perspective of eco-translatology to translate the place names in Lingnan folk tales. The cases in point show that the translation methods such as direct translation, free translation, and annotation can be applied according to the specific cultural context and the communicative intention in the folk tales with the ultimate goal to let the translation survive effectively in the translation ecology of the target language, spread the culture in the source text and make readers of the target language arouse the same feeling brought by the source text