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Translation and Foreign Language Learning

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ArticleTranslation Theories and Skills http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2026.02.006

A Study of Culture-loaded Words in Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang’s English Translation of Tomorrow from the Perspective of Embodied-cognitive Translatology

Xipeng Si

School of Foreign Languages, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao 266510, Shandong, China.

*Corresponding author: Xipeng Si

Published: February 28, 2026

Abstract

As concentrated carriers of national culture, the culture-loaded words directly affect the work’s cross-cultural communication. Lu Xun’s short story Tomorrow contains a large number of culture-loaded words reflecting society, religion and other aspects. These words carry the folk customs, feudal ethics and humanistic spirit of Jiangnan towns, which are key to understanding the ideological connotation of the work. This paper takes Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang’s English version of Tomorrow as the research object. Based on the three-level framework of Embodied-Cognitive Translatology, combined with the dialectical relationship between “embodiment” and “cognition”, the paper analyzes the translation strategies of different types of culture-loaded words. The Yangs’ translation is not only faithful to the cultural connotation of the original text, but also guarantees the readability of the translation and the effect of cross-cultural communication, which provides a practical paradigm for the translation of culture-loaded words. Through the analysis, the paper hopes to provide some theoretical reference for the translation of culture-loaded words in modern Chinese literature, and help the cross-cultural communication of Lu Xun’s works and the further dissemination of Chinese culture.

Keyword

Embodied-Cognitive Translatology; culture-loaded words; Tomorrow; translation strategies

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Copyright

© 2026 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

How to cite this paper

A Study of Culture-loaded Words in Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang’s English Translation of Tomorrow from the Perspective of Embodied-cognitive Translatology

How to cite this paper: Xipeng Si. (2026). A Study of Culture-loaded Words in Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang’s English Translation of Tomorrow from the Perspective of Embodied-cognitive Translatology. Translation and Foreign Language Learning2(2), 203-208.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2026.02.006