On Cultural Presupposition And Its Management In Translation

Cultural presupposition is a kind of social common awareness or group awareness that is determined by a certain nation or social culture in brief, i.e. stereotyped thinking and behavioral patterns. This kind of common awareness or group awareness is an integration of the social experiences of certain community rather than the accumulated psychological experiences passed down with times. Based on these experiences, the connotation of cultural norms which can be called "regular relation"is different greatly. Translators from different cultural backgrounds unconsciously explain or understand the same cultural phenomenon in different cultures with their own social awareness or group awareness. In order to translate successfully, translators are required to get familiar not only with the similarities and differences of the structure and discourse of the two involved languages but also with the using characteristics and social cultural norms. Thus, they can correctly understand the messages in the original text and transfer the writer's intended meaning to the readers through their work in the condition fit for the culture and the cognitive expectations of the readers of the translation. Therefore, it becomes a problem calling for highly attention that how to understand cultural presupposition and how to properly deal with cultural presupposition in translation.This paper does tentative research on the definition of cultural presupposition, the forming reasons of cultural presupposition, the characteristics of cultural presupposition, the functions of cultural presupposition and the classifications of cultural presupposition, etc. Then it discusses the operating rules of cultural presuppositions in translation. It comes to the following two conclusions: first, the translators'cross-cultural understanding of cultural presupposition is a transferring process of cultural presupposition in which the translators pick and choose the cultural message of their own nation and reconstruct the new cultural presupposition of the incoming cultures. And in order to handle the cultural presuppositions of SL and TL properly in translation, translators are required to have strong cross-cultural awareness and recognize the existence of the two different cultural presuppositions. Otherwise misreading of cultural presuppositions will occur and severely influence the translation; second, as to the different cultural presuppositions of SL and TL, translators should adopt all kinds translating strategies to reconstruct cultural presuppositions of SL in translation to a maximum, helping the readers of TL to reduce the sense of vacuum in reading, so as to establish semantic coherence and achieve the aim of cross-cultural communication.