Cultural Misreading Under Translation Ethics

Nowadays politics and economics of the world have been developing at a high speed. The world has become a global village in which people from different regions have been brought into more and more close contact with each other and the mutual understanding has also been deeper and deeper. As a kind of important cross culture activity, translation has already been the necessary part. It not only transfers semantic messages but also conveys those of culture. During this process the translator plays the most important role. Due to the existence of cultural diversities, the translator cannot make sure that the target text will be absolutely faithful to the source text. The translator makes a full understanding of the source text at first and translates it into the source text through certain translation strategies. After every possible effort the translator represents the target text to the target reader. Because of the influence from varieties of alien cultural factors and the translator's own culture, cultural misreading is likely to occur.Cultural misreading is an inevitable phenomenon in cultural communication and cannot be erased from translation. It produces great influence on source text, target text, translation theory and the translator. The source text may be distorted and the information in it could not be expressed correctly. But it may also be widely accepted and become prevalence. Culture and literary genre of the target text can be enriched to a large degree. The traditional fidelity in translation has been challenged and translation criticism puts translation in a wider cultural background and pays more attention to the translator. The translator's creativity and cultural background is respected and the social status is constantly raised. Besides translation competence and cultural sense of the translator has been strengthened and the translation quality can be guaranteed.This thesis consists of three parts, i.e. introduction, four chapters and conclusion. Introduction starts with the problem of translation ethics under the background of globalization, the inevitability of cultural misreading and requirements for the translator, and the general structure of this thesis.Chapter One begins with the basic concepts, introducing the definition of culture and its categories, the definition of cultural misreading and its categories, and many factors which leads to cultural misreading.Chapter Two provides the theory foundation of the whole thesis. This part illustrates Andrew Chesterman's five models of translation ethics and the translator's responsibilities proposed by Sun Zhili based on it. It supplies the theoretical support for the possibility and necessity of cultural misreadingChapter Three is the case study. This part gives detailed analysis of varieties of cultural misreading caused by cultural diversities and presents the influence of cultural misreading.Chapter Four expounds the translator's ethics through the concept "harmony in difference" (Zuo Zhuan) in the Chinese culture tradition and bring forward a higher claim to the translator's role and ethic sense.Conclusion points out that cultural misreading should be viewed in a correct way. Translation is a kind of dynamic cultural communication and the study of it should be carried out in a wider cultural circumstance. Meanwhile, the continuous development of society and the change of the translator's self perception make this phenomenon more complicated. Further research should be made to bring a more clear understanding of cultural misreading and promote communication among different cultures.