Translation of Local Seasonal Culture-Loaded Words in Seasons of China: A Reception-Aesthetic Perspective

Seasons of China (2019) is a 24-episode documentary; it was produced by Xinhua News Network Corporation, and it is presented by Dominic Johnson-Hill, a British expatriate. The series gives international audiences a rare look at China’s Twenty-Four Solar Terms and the farming traditions that are closely tied to them. This paper draws on three episodes—Grain in Ear (Mangzhong), Autumn Equinox (Qiufen), and Grain Rain (Guyu)—and it uses the perspective of audience reception as its theoretical frame; the aim is to see how words that carry local seasonal culture travel across different languages and cultures. The study is guided by two ideas from Jauss: “horizon of expectations” and “aesthetic distance.” Six representative examples are looked at, which cover folk farming rituals, seasonal specialty foods, regional eating customs, and farm products that have been adapted to local conditions. The findings show a flexible set of strategies—transliteration supported by context, functional paraphrasing, calling on shared cultural knowledge, and literal translation together with added context—each of these is adjusted to find a working balance between keeping the culture real and making it understandable for the audience. A British host also appears in the series, and his on-screen learning process works as a kind of cultural bridge, because it mirrors how an imagined foreign viewer might learn. By paying attention to farming cultural knowledge more than to translation skills alone, this study brings a fresh angle to the growing research on Chinese publicity documentaries.