Strategies for Translating Chinese Colloquial Expressions into English in Science Fiction: A Case Study of English Version of the Three-body Problem

Abstract

In recent years, Liu Cixin’s trilogy the Three-body Problem, a science fiction novel, has broken the monopoly of foreign science fiction, won massive and popular reviews and admiration from Chinese and foreign readers, and has become an important source for Chinese culture to “go global”. To some extent, the result of English translation of science fiction has relatively affected its spread abroad. In the context of cultural differences, in order to enable overseas readers to correctly feel and understand the cultural elements of Chinese science fiction, it is necessary to properly convey specific meaning specially owned by cultural specific words during translation. Based on this, this paper takes the Three-body Problem as an source text, and through the analysis of examples, studies the English translation strategies of colloquial expressions, hoping to facilitate promoting the quality of translation work.