Region - Educational Research and Reviews

Culture-loaded terms refer to the words that contain richly social and cultural meanings. They can best reflect the distinctive culture of a nation and are therefore of crucial importance in terms of cultural transmission and communication. From the perspective of Memetics, which explores the principle of cultural evolution, this article discusses the strategy to translate the culture-loaded terms in Chinese classics, with the aim of effectively spreading Chinese culture. Through qualitative, descriptive, and comparative research methods, this study analyzes the translation of culture-loaded terms in the two English versions of a classical Chinese novel, A Dream of Red Mansions translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang and The Story of the Stone translated by David Hawkes and John Minford respectively. The findings show that translators should make great efforts to retain the exotic flavor of source texts and to take the acceptability of target readers into careful consideration when translating the culture-loaded terms in Chinese classics into English. Moreover, under the guidance of this translation strategy, the method of a literal translation with annotation and the method of a transliteration with annotation are two effective translation methods for culture-loaded terms.