Abstract
With cultures rooted in medieval Europe, A Song of Ice and Fire and its television adaptation Game of Thrones have a lot of culture-loaded terms reflecting Westeros’s distinctive political institutions, religious beliefs, social customs, and value systems. Translating them into Chinese is a complex and challenging act of intercultural communication. Translators must build a bridge between source- and target-culture contexts, conveying the original’s exotic atmosphere while ensuring fluency and cultural acceptability in Chinese. Taking Hu Gengshen’s Eco-Translatology as theoretical guidance, this paper aims to discuss strategies for Chinese translation of culture-loaded terms in Game of Thrones. With the analysis of a popular Chinese edition produced by Qu Chang and Tan Guanglei, the paper tries to apply the strategy of Adaptive Selection and Selective Adaptation from three dimensions—the linguistic dimension, the cultural dimension, and the communicative dimension to handle various culture-loaded items, including proper names, institutional concepts, religious terms, and colloquial curses. The analysis indicates that the success of the Qu–Tan translation rests on the translators’ full assumption of an active central role. From the linguistic dimension, the translators flexibly employed transliteration to handle personal names, place names, and titles, thereby preserving necessary exoticness while conforming to Chinese expressive norms. From the cultural dimension, confronted with substan-tial differences between Eastern and Western cultures, the translators achieved a skillful balance between foreignization and domestication. From the communicative dimension, they consistently prioritized reproducing the communicative intent of the original text. The study deepens understanding of the translation practice for Game of Thrones and offers reference for cultural communication and Chinese translations of Western fantasy.
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How to cite this paper
A Study of the Chinese Translation of Culture-loaded Words in Game of Thrones—From the Perspective of Eco-translatology
How to cite this paper: Lin Su, Qiujing Yan. (2025). A Study of the Chinese Translation of Culture-loaded Words in Game of Thrones—From the Perspective of Eco-translatology. Translation and Foreign Language Learning, 1(2), 277-281.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2025.09.011