On Translation Strategies Involving Cultural Factors

Cultural differences between the West and China result in difficulties and misunderstanding in translation which in turn make cultural translation a focus in literary translation. In the translation circles nowadays, discussions on cultural translation strategies generally lay out as dichotomies: free translation vs. literal translation, target-oriented domestication vs. source-oriented foreignization and the like. Because of their advantages and disadvantages, debates set out from different perspectives concerning their applications in literary works are hot and endless.The author of the present thesis tries to view this problem from functionalist approaches, stating that the combination of Skopostheorie and semantic vs. communicative approach serves as a reasonable tool to analyze the choice of translation strategies, and the purpose of the translator determines the main translation strategy to employ. In addition to this, factors like initiator, target language readers, text type, intention of the original author and the specific cultural context influence the choice of translation strategies as well. Then the author analyzes some specific translation difficulties of cultural factors and the translation strategies suggested concerning cultural differences in the way of thinking, religion, values, traditional cultural conceptions, the way of living and psychological associations.At last, Yang Hsien-yi's The Scholars is taken for a case study in which the cultural factors are grouped into seven categories. After analyzing the translation strategies applied in each example, the author draws a conclusion: Yang's translation purpose—to keep close to the original images and cultural heritage and render them to the target readers as much as possible—determines that he uses semantic translation as his main translation strategy and communicative translation as the complementary one.Due to the complexity of cultural conditions in literary works, any single translation strategy can not satisfy the needs of translation. Taking one strategy as a dominant one is sure to have the other as a complement. Therefore translation strategies in dichotomies can not satisfy the needs of cultural translation. In translation studies, it is essential that such factors as target text purpose be taken into consideration in accordance with the specific cultural context when an objective and scientific analysis on translation strategies is carried out.