The Relationship Between Cultural Translation And Cultural Identity

Since the "cultural turn" in translation research,cultural translation has become a hot topic.Homi Bhabha,one of the masters of postcolonial theory,stated in his masterpieceThe Location of Culture that the state of being transferred from a country(thus a culture)to another should be interpreted as "translation phenomenon".Therefore,in this thesis the cultural translation phenomenon includes not only the linguistic and semantic transference between languages in traditional sense,but also the displacement of culture in chronology,space and geography.And it emphasizes the function of translation as a carrier for cultural transmission.As the great heritage of Chinese American literature,Angel Island poetry has got much attention from the field of history and literature in western countries.Island:Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island,1910-1940 consists of a historical introduction,135 poems in Chinese and English,excerpts from thirty-nine oral history interviews,and twenty-two photographs of the period.By openly airing the dark secrets of racial exclusion and illegal immigration,the book serves as a catharsis as well as an exoneration of those who had been imprisoned on Angel Island.It allows them to reclaim their history,reconcile with their immigration past,and take pride in their ethnic heritage and cultural identity.As the representative work of Chinese American literature in the early period,Island is the epitome of the early immigration history of Chinese American.It is not only the recording of the miserable sufferings of those Chinese workers in the interweaving of two cultures,but also an important work of cultural translation.The study of it is no doubt worthwhile.Therefore,this thesis employs Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theory to analyze the book.It analyzes the poems in Chinese and English from the multi-dimensions of the connotations of cultural translation,exploring how cultural translation exerts influence on the construction of cultural identity.By critical reading of the translated poems,the thesis attempts to draw a conclusion upon the degree of applicability of Homi Bhabha’s theory to the analysis of Island,hoping to get inspirations from this study and to the translation of Chinese culture and the study of Island in China.