A Study On Tea Culture Translation In Classical Chinese Poetry From The Perspective Of Cultural Presupposition

The concept of presupposition originates from philosophical debates, and gradually developed into the field of pragmatics. Cultural presupposition is a kind of pragmatic presupposition. It refers to habitual thinking or behavior pattern in a specific cultural background. However, translation is a study which deliberately express cultural features of the original to target language readers. Accordingly, cultural presupposition is a big obstacle for translators.Poetry is the essence of Chinese traditional culture. And China is the homeland of tea and the nation of poetry. A lot of great literature are created by the splendid combination of tea and poetry. Tea poetry is the carrier of Chinese traditional culture and it plays a great role in cultural communication. English translation of tea poetry makes great contributions to cultural communication in the world. As an important part of pragmatic presupposition, cultural presupposition possesses strong explanatory capability to Chinese tea poetry. China is the birthplace of tea so that tea itself is a kind of cultural presupposition.This thesis makes great effort to explore how to faithfully restore the concept of culture presupposition in the translation of tea culture based on cultural presupposition and its relative theories by analyzing English versions of four Chinese tea poetry. It comes to the following conclusions:in order to properly handle the problems in translation brought about by cultural presupposition of tea, translators are required to strengthen the perception towards the cultural presupposition of tea and make an accurate judgment about the existence of cultural presupposition. Translators should adopt appropriate methods in the hope to transfer the cultural presupposition in source language text to the uttermost, so as to help the target language readers remove the sense of vacuum in reading and retain semantic coherence, and at last to achieve the aim of spreading tea culture.