A Study On Cultural Translation Strategies

Since the"Cultural Turn"in translation studies started in the late 1980s, culture and translation have been bound tightly together. Nowadays, translation is not only considered as the transfer between different languages but also regarded as a communicative activity between two cultures; hence the emergency of"Cultural Translation". In the process of cultural translation, translation strategies must be adopted. Thus which strategy to choose is a question each translator has to answer, yet no consensus has ever been reached. Therefore, this dissertation, starting with the debate on translation strategies in current academic circles, is intended to present a study on cultural translation strategies, taking two English versions of Fu Sheng Liu Ji, a Chinese classic, as an example.In the first chapter of the dissertation, a review of the definitions of cultural translation is given for a multitude of definitions are given from different perspectives. Based on a detailed analysis, the dissertation holds that the definition of cultural translation can be given in a broad sense and in a narrow sense. The former refers to the study of translation from the perspective of culture, which aims at exploring the intrinsic relationship between culture and translation and the objective laws governing translation of cultural connotation; whereas the latter refers to the translation of cultural message existing in the source text. The dissertation firstly defines its object as the translation of cultural message in the source text, and then gives a detailed exploration of the relationship between language, culture and translation.This dissertation continues with a historical retrospect over the debate on translation strategies, which is quite hot both in China and abroad. The dissertation holds that, as far as cultural translation is concerned, both foreignization advocated by Venuti and domestication represented by Nida have their own features: foreignization, a source language oriented strategy, aims to retain the"foreignness"of the source text; while domestication, a target language oriented strategy, tends to achieve the naturalness and smoothness of the target language. In the process of translation, being influenced by the translator's intention, text types, and target readers'background and expectation, translators tend to adopt such methods as word-for-word translation, transliteration, substitution, explication, annotation and omission, which belong to different translation strategies.In chapter three, the dissertation goes on with a case study of two English versions of Fu Sheng Liu Ji which are translated respectively by Lin Yutang and Leonard Pratt & Chiang Suhui. As an autobiographical work written by Shen Fu in Qing dynasty, Fu Sheng Liu Ji contains much ancient Chinese culture message. The comparative study of the two versions shows that the six basic methods mentioned in chapter two are adopted in the process of cultural translation and in some cases more than one method is used, which means that domestication and foreignization co-exist in the two English versions. Therefore, on the one hand, the study of the two English versions of Fu Sheng Liu Ji verifies the influence of the translator's intention, text types and target readers on the adoption of translation strategies; on the other hand, it shows that an interwoven adoption of different translation strategies will be helpful in translating cultural message.