Translating culture-loaded words : a case study of reminiscences of Old Beijing—the language features of Zhang Zhongxing

Chengyu is an old Chinese language form with a unique format and structure. It all has their unique stories or source behind. It represents the wisdom of the Chinese ancients and displays the highest level of expressions of the Chinese language where a message can be conveyed without using long chain of words. In the book Reminiscences of Old Beijing, the author, Zhang Zhongxing, uses many chengyu to describe his memory. This research aims to study the translation strategies used regarding the translation of chengyu extracted from the book. During the author’s translation of chengyu, there are three strategies used in this case study: literal translation, literal translation with amplification, and literal translation with footnotes and amplification. To preserve the features of chengyu, literal translation is going to be applied to all the chengyu regardless of the level of difficult of the chengyu. Each of these translation strategies have their advantages and disadvantages. Literal translation strategy might be useful in raising target readers’ attention while keeping the literal meaning of chengyu as much as possible. However, every coin has two sides. The translation strategies employed in this case study also have their problems such as the loss of context, rhythm, and flow. However, it is more critical to preserve the source language culture to ensure no hierarchy is present. Thus, finding the balance between the source language culture and the fluency for target text readers is still an on-going objective to achieve. Key words: chengyu, foreignization, literal translation, amplification, annotationMaster of Arts (Translation and Interpretation