The thesis is made up of five sections: apart from the first part——the introduction here, Section 2 presents some theories at home and abroad。 Section 3 deals with an analysis of the phenomenon of lexical gap from Empresses in the Palace。 In Section 4, it attempts to explore the cultural factors which lead to the phenomenon of lexical gap。 The last Section tries to introduce translation strategies and cross-cultural communication strategies to tackle the problem in cross-cultural communication。

2。 Literature Review

“In 1957, Lado R proposed lexical gap in his book Linguistics Across Cultures, in which he made a contrastive study of Russian and English from perspectives of lexical gap”。 (Yang Qing, 2005:2)

Afterwards, more and more scholars at home and abroad have vowed to research in this field。 They have contributed to the study from different angles。 “In 1997, the book Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words/English, Russian, Polish, German and Japanese by Anna Wiezbicka was seen, but notably and regrettably, it is unavailable in Chinese”。 (Yang Qing, 2005:2) According to Chen Xinren, “a lexical gap refers to the absence of a lexeme for an object or an idea and becomes prominent in the meaning relation of hyponymy”。 (Chen 70) In 1982, Professor Tan Zaixi put forward the classification of lexical gap in the paper A Contrastive Analysis of Semantics in Translation。 Professor Zhang Houchen considers that the lexical gap is rather common after comparing vocabulary of different languages。 Chinese scholar Wu Yuemin makes a brief analysis of lexical gap in different cultures。 He provides several examples between Chinese and English to illustrate that loanwords play an important role in filling lexical gap。 Moreover, the elaborate paper by Zhao Wenxue and Yang Min holds that lexical gap occurs due to cultural differences so that some words in one language can hardly find corresponding meaning in another。 They also present lexical gap made up of the vacancy of referential and pragmatic meaning。 They further explore cultural causes which lead to lexical gap, such as differences in language systems, lifestyles and modes of production, environment, customs, religions and values。 Besides, Xiang Yinhua not only probes into the reasons, but discusses the translatability and available translations of lexical gap。 What’s more, He Xiaoqun states English and Chinese lexical gap in various aspects。 She offers three solutions to the problem, that is, translation method, intercultural communication method and teaching method。 And Bai Jingyu offers several basic translations in the face of different cultures。 文献综述

However, many literatures focus on the lexical gap and its relevant translation strategies rather than the cultural element。 Language learning can’t do without learning its culture。 So it is of great necessity to carry out a comprehensive research in cross-cultural communication。 Thus a research on lexical gap is promising。 Available works lack a specific example to do research on lexical gap。 So this paper takes Empresses in the Palace as an example, gives an illustration of lexical gap from cultural differences and presents the effective methods from translation strategies and cross-cultural communication strategies to fill lexical gap。

3。 Analysis of the Phenomenon of Lexical Gap in Cross-cultural Communication

As for the category of lexical gap, it is mainly pided into two types: conceptual vacancy and semantic vacancy。 On the one hand, it means no corresponding expressions can be discovered because of non-existence of something in other language。 On the other, even if one can find some replacements, the connotations in one language are not equal to those in the other language。

3。1 Conceptual vacancy

It means expressions in Chinese can not find counterparts in English because of non-existence of something in English。