Cultural words are the foundation of a nation. To learn the culture of a nation, the most important is to understand the language of that nation. Thus, translation of culture-loaded words plays an important role as it can effectively convey the Chinese culture to foreigners. To disseminate Chinese culture all over the world, translation of culture-loaded words is a long-term and hard task. Based mainly on the study of C-E Metaphor Translation Principles, this paper will focus on the translation of culture-loaded words in the translation of the Report of the 19th NCCPC. Besides, in taking this approach, it is also possible to explore how the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspective of translation can contribute to cross-cultural communication between countries. Then this thesis will discuss the use of C-E metaphor translation approach in the translation of the Report of the 19th NCCPC, showing how translators handled metaphorical expressions, and what effects it had for the text itself, for text reception by President Xi, and for subsequent developments. This thesis will begin by giving a brief introduction of culture-loaded words and C-E metaphor translation. Then it will analyze how the metaphors in cultural-loaded words were dealt with in the metaphor translation. In addition, this thesis looks into the implicit metaphor of culture-loaded words in the Report of the 19th NCCPC from a cross-cultural perspective so that effective cross-cultural communication can be achieved.

2. Literature Review

Language and culture are closely related as language is the carrier of culture and a symbol of culture. Thus translation can be seen as a cross-cultural behavior. Translation is a kind of cultural exchange between the two texts. Language plays the role of expressing culture. For example, the mode of thinking of the western people is implied in the structure of English. What’s more, the metaphorical culture-loaded words are the most typical carrier of the cultural. Thus, the C-E metaphor translation of metaphorical culture-loaded words plays a decisive role in cross-cultural communication.

2.1The definition of Culture-loaded words

Culture-loaded words are the precious cultural heritage, The widely-known linguist Lado defines culture-loaded words as “lexical items that are similar in primary meaning in both L1 and L2 but different meaning in connotation” (Lado 197). In addition, professor Wang Dechun (1998) claims that culture-loaded words are words which reflect the history, culture and folk customs of a country in which a certain language is used, and they bear the obvious characteristics of the national culture. According to Newmark (1998), Whether single-unit lexemes, phrase or collocations are those which are particularly tied to the way of life and its manifestations that are peculiar to a community that uses a particular language as its means of expression. Another vision about culture-loaded words is that “the words from the source text convey a concept utterly new for the target culture” (Baker 200). The other view on the definition of culture-loaded words is that they refer to those vocabularies that can mostly embody the cultural information carried by language and reflect people’s social life. In recent years, the translation of them has become one of the core problems in cross-cultural communication that needs full attention and solution as “culture-loaded words and expressions are loaded with specific national cultural information and indicate deep national culture, structure of words and expressions” (Hu 199). To translate these culture-loaded words into another language without affecting readers’ understanding of the underlying culture, further study of the culture of the source language is greatly needed. Culture-loaded words can be regarded as words, idioms, or expressions that have typical meanings in a particular culture and because of the different culture backgrounds we are in, our understanding of the same object may differ with each other. They are the words embedded in their distinctive culture and foreigners who want to learn them well need to know their cultural implications. In the language system culture-loaded words are the vocabulary which can best embody the cultural information that a language carries and they also reflect social life. As affected by the geographical environment, local customs, way of thinking, religious beliefs, ethnic and psychological factors different nations have formed their own distinctive culture.