Views On Culture And Philosophy Of Translation

Translation studies have always been carried out since the very beginning of the translation activities in history, especially of the translation in written form. Whenever translation activities came to a high tide, it would push translation studies a leap forward always followed by with more and more severe debates concerned. Today, as a brand-new academic area, translation studies have been undergoing a remarkable turn, establishing an interactive and interlaping relationship with cultural studies. The cultural turn from studies on cultures has successfully realized the paradigm shift from studies on pure languages to the studies on cultures and created the interactive relations between languages and cultures. Cultural Turn has transformed translation studies from the prescriptive studies concerning languages to descriptive studies in terms of cultures. With this translation theory, translation no longer means the sheer conversion of the symbols of two languages, but is placed in the prospective of broad colures for studies and discussion.Just in such a new prospective is this dissertation expounded and demonstrated. In the dissertation, the author of the dissertation, taken cultures as longitude, translation as latitude, has reasoned and expounded the interlocking and intertwined relationship between the views on culture and the philosophy of translation.The dissertation is made up of seven chapters. Starting from Cultural Turn (Chapter One), it moves to the exploration of and studies on Lu Xun's and Lin Yutang's different views on cultures (Chapter Two) so as to work out the theoretic basis for their different orientations of literay creation as well as to try to prove them(Chapter Three) with evidence. In Chapter Four, the author has taken Lu Xun's and Lin Yutang's views on culture as a scale for judgement, which is logically applied to the subjective selection of works for translation carried out by both Lu Xun and Lin Yutang. Up to Chapter Five, Lu Xun's and Lin Yutang's philosophy of translation have come into being with the influence of their views on culture and both keep in the same line and same tone in harmony. Due to the different philosophies of translation, they advocated different translation theories and put forward different translation principles, which, accordingly, lead to their different translation strategies that they actually applied in their translation practice (Chapter Six). The conclusion is made in Chapter Seven, which serves as the upshot of the dissertation.The author has noticed that in the area of translation history study, especially in recent years, ever-increasing efforts have been made in the combing of and the studies on the translation events and the translators in a certain historic period. More and more detailed textual research has been made on the historical evidences concerned. However, the roles which the translation events and the translators ever played and the influences which they ever made in history have rarely been discussed and taken into consideration in a macroscopical manner. Due to the fact that the detailed combing and the micro studies of translation events have been proved far away from the macro prospective of culture, they have failed to help explore the sources of culture from which the translators came from, nor help make studies on the translators and their translation works in the points of view of cross-culture communication. Such issues as selection of translation works, the standpoint of culture and the reconstruction of values have been neglected. Obviously, the research methodology is something like seeing trees without seeing the wood, which prevents people from realizing the cultural traits in translation activities. Though translation studies involve some micro studies on translation skills and language conversion and so on, they are not expected to account for too much in the overall translation studies. Otherwise, some more important aspects in translation studies would be given insufficient attention or even a complete neglect. In a result, the cultural nature in translation activities would not be properly realized and grasped.With the ever-increasing awareness of cultural recognition in translation and the set-up of the views on both culture and translation, translation studies have been greatly upgraded and deepened to a new level, characterized by Cultural Turn with profound significance in the development process of translation studies. Along with the Cultural Turn, came the views of culture being applied in translation studies, which provide us with the workable and reliable basis for the studies on Lu Xun's and Lin Yutang's views on culture and philosophy of translation as well as the interactive and intertwined relationship between them. Meanwhile we are encouraged and guided to explore even more valuable findings. So far, it is the opening part of the dissertation.From the extensive survey of and the in-depth studies on the gradual and profound influences made respectively upon Lu Xun and Lin Yutang by the interior and exterior environments where they devoted themselves both physically and spiritually in their early years, the author has noticed that Lu Xun and Lin Yutang, although sharing the same historic background, held totally different views on culture. With the different views on culture, Lu Xun and Lin Yutang set apart by naturally applying their own distinctive views on culture in their literary creation of all types, which further shaped their everlasting orientations of literary creation. With their different orientation of literary creation, Lu Xun sticked to "Art for Life" as his concept of literature while Lin Yutang expressed his pursuit of literature for leisure as "Art for Art" and adhered to it in his whole life. At the same time, the author has also noticed that the works for translation carried out by both Lu Xun and Lin Yutang were carefully selected by them and their selections were totally oriented by their own views on culture. Lu Xun tended to take those with distinctive orientation of political or national struggle and revolution while Lin Yutang was interested in translating those works delivering quietness, gracefulness, humanity, self-cultivation as well as leisure and relaxation. Obviously all his choice resulted from his pursuit of life.This dissertation is also intended to make a comparative study of Lu Xun's and LinYutang's translation principles. Different from the traditional translation studies, the present dissertation is not intended to make an evaluative study of translation skills and techniques on the textual level. On the contrary, it tries to investigate both objective socio-cultural factors—particularly social and cultural position of the early 20's China and the subjective cultural attitudes taken by Lu Xun and Lin Yutang towards it in order to find out how these factors influenced their choices of translation strategies.In a broad sense, all human activities can be regarded as cultural activities. Translation activity forms an important part of cultural exchange between different languages. But the cultural exchange between different nations has never been on an equal stage. According to the polysystem hypothesis proposed by Even-Zohar, translators in a strong literary polysystem tend to apply domesticating strategy and thus produce translations characterized by superficial fluency, while in a weak culture, foreignizing strategy prevails. He believed that the cultural status in literature of a nation decides the "primary" or "secondary" position of translated literature in the polysystem and in turn it will to a large extent determine translators' translation strategies. It's necessary to point out that the polysystem hypothesis can explain the determining effect of objective socio-cultural factors on the prevalent translation strategies employed by most translators during certain period of time. But exception exists. Through the comparative study of Lu Xun and Lin Yutang's translation principles and practice, we find that whether the objective cultural position of translated literature can influence translators' translation strategies is largely due to whether the translators' subjective identification is in accordance with the objective cultural position of a nation. Besides, translators' different understandings of the nature of translation also exert great influence upon translators' translation strategies.Through the detailed investigation of Lu Xun and Lin Yutang's cultural attitudes, which mainly include the investigations of their attitudes towards Confucianism, attitudes towards Chinese classical literature and attitudes towards the literary revolution in modern China, the dissertation tries to point out that different early-life experiences and educational experiences between Lu Xun and Lin Yutang lead to their different formation of literary conception and translation principles as well, although they lived in almost the same social and cultural background. Lu Xun, who was regarded as the indomitable fighter, dared to look reality in the face. He saw the Chinese culture as "backward" and thus emphasized the social function of literature. He advocated foreignizating strategy in translation in order to import both new ideas and new ways of expressions for the reform of decaying Chinese culture and the overthrow of the Qing government. On the contrary, Lin Yutang chose to take a completely opposite direction to that of Lu Xun's. From the early age, Lin Yutang began to get influenced by the Western culture and he became somehow more familiar with the Western culture than with the Chinese culture. And he formed a unique understanding of the Chinese culture that divorced from the dominant trend of his time. Thus he chose to introduce the Chinese culture by translating Chinese literary works including noveles, essayes, poetry and the like and by doing creative writing in English as well. In order to appeal to the Western readers' expectation, Lin Yutang was more willing to employ domesticating strategy in translation.From this we can see, it is the translator's subjective choice that plays the decisive role in choosing translation strategies. Although the polysystem hypothesis has taken the objective social-cultural factors into consideration, it neglects the subjective identification of translators. By taking into account the translators' cultural attitudes towards the Chinese culture and translated literature in the Chinese literary polysystem, this dissertation argues that individual translators' cultural attitudes play an important part in their selection of translation strategies. This finding explains why Lin Yutang tends to apply domesticating strategy while Lu Xun prefers foreignizing strategy although they lived in the same social cultural environment.The dissertation focuses on the studies in contrast on Lu Xun and Lin Yutang's views on culture and philosophy of translation, based on which, we come to the conclusion that the cultural position enjoyed by translated literature can make influence on the selections of translation principles and strategies adopted by the translators. This is determined by whether the translator has subjective agreement or disagreement with the objective cultural position. When the objective position enjoyed by a certain culture conforms with the subjective agreement held by the translator, the translation principles and strategies applied by the translator will be like what the polysystem theory reasons. However, when the subjective agreement contradicts with the objective position of the culture involved, the translation strategies adopted by the translator will change. In addition, the translators' different recognition of the nature of translation makes remarkable difference in their translation delivery.