From “Two Mountains” to “Beautiful Villages”: Translation Strategies for China’s Rural Branding

Abstract

  This paper investigates the cultural adaptation and translation strategies utilized in the Chinese-English (C-E) translation of Finding the Soul for the Village: A Framework for branding Rural Development. Based on Interpretive Theory, as the nature of this qualitative study, the research explores the significance of meaning, cultural self-formation, and rural branding discourse translation across languages and cultures. Describing China’s campaign of rural revitalization and one cannot but ask how many nights a translator would spend tossing, translating when it is so saturated with culture, history and politics. The work also reveals the contradictions in terms of the processes of meaning and the conceptual translation, such as Two Mountains Theory and Beautiful Villages which have the ideological elements. This paper aims to examine how translation strategies are implemented in the face of challenges posed by cultural translation for the branding of the rural, notably how locally centered and culturally bound messages as Two Mountains and Beautiful Villages can be effectively translated. Both foreignization, used when the actual cultural terms are imported together with a gloss, and domestication, where terms are adapted for a particular target culture are evaluated. The findings addressed in the paper reveals that the translator performs the role of a culture broker, whose role is valuable when translating the ‘spirit’ of the rural development and branding for the readers from other cultural context. Last but not the least, this paper presents its conclusions about the functions of translation to bridge the cultures/ languages and how this process engages with culturally/or policy-important texts such as Finding The Soul For The Village.