On Interpreting Strategies of Culture-Loaded Words from the Perspective of Linguistic Memetics

Culture-loaded words, with distinct cultural features, lead to lexical gaps for linguistic memes during transmission, which brings daunting challenges to interpreters. Despite various earlier studies of culture-loaded words conducted mainly from the perspective of functional equivalence, relevance theory, interpretive theory or ecological translatology, few are carried out from the perspective of linguistic memetics. For that reason, this paper constructs a Chinese-English interpreting corpus. Based on the corpus analysis method, it first retrieves all qualified culture-loaded words and classifies them into three categories from the perspective of linguistic memetics according to their representation information and content: form-meaning compound culture-loaded words (FMCWs), pronunciation derived culture-loaded words (PDWs) and culture-loaded words derived from morphological structures (MSDWs). Then it explores the interpreting strategies adopted for all culture-loaded words under the guidance of linguistic memetics, and finally summarizes the main interpreting strategies of FMCWs, PDWs, and MSDWs respectively on the basis of applied frequencies. The result shows that our study, compared with predecessors, presents more targeted and practical solutions for interpreters and brings fresh perspective for further studies.