Influence Of Translator's Cultural Identity On Tranlsation

During the 1970s, scholars who conducted their research on translation shifted their attention from the perspective of linguistics to that of culture. The cultural turn in translation studies provided a new angle for scholars both at home and abroad. Against this background, cultural identity, one of the key concepts in cultural studies, became the focus of the study made by the scholars of the translation circle.The integration of the complex configuration of culture into the individual's personality constitutes one's cultural identity. Cultural identity is a dynamic construction mechanism and it has formed and developed since one's childhood in the process of human socialization. It has the characteristic of flexibility and stability. Translators, the manipulator of the target text, don't live in vacuum. They construct their diverse cultural identities under the influence of different cultural systems. The author of this paper conducted a case study based on the classic Chinese poems translated by Xu Yuanchong and Arthur Waley. Through collection, the author firstly sorted out from numerous poems their commonly translated versions of different dynasties and genres, and then selected the ones that are representatives of their translation theories and practice. Based on the data collection, a contrastive analysis is made to explore how the translators'cultural identities influence their translation activities. The study shows that different translators with different cultural identities have diverse cultural presupposition towards the source language culture and construct their different translation theories and poetics under the influence of their local culture, all of which exert further influence on their translation activities in terms of the to-be-selected texts, the interpretation and understanding of the source text, and the translation strategies adopted. The flexibility of cultural identity implies that the translators'understanding of the source texts and the translation strategies to be adopted will gradually change due to their increasing knowledge of the source culture.This thesis is composed of six chapters.The first and second chapters introduce the background of the cultural turn of translation studies and discuss the theory of cultural identity and the researches into Xu Yuanchong and Arthur Waley from the perspective of cultural identity.The third chapter explores the construction process of cultural identity from both the macro and micro angles and summarizes the dialectic features of cultural identity from the perspectives of similarities and differences, stability and flexibility, and self-identification and external identification. Then a classification of the cultural identity is made from the aspects of country identity, national identity, region identity and community identity.In the fourth chapter a comparative study of the cultural identities of Xu Yuanchong and Arthur Waley is made through the analysis of their living background.The fifth chapter examines how Xu's and Waley's different cultural identities contribute to their translation activity in terms of the selection of the source texts to be translated, the interpretation of the texts and the strategies employed based on a detailed discussion and analysis of their cultural identities and their translation theories and practice.The sixth chapter is the conclusion of the research which summarizes the whole thesis and mentions the limitation of the research.On the whole, this thesis makes an exploration of the influence of translators' cultural identity on translation based on a comparative case study of the translated versions of the classic Chinese poems by Arthur Waley and Xu Yuanchong. It is the author's hope that this paper will make some contribution to translation studies and encourage more future research on Xu's and Waley's translation theories and practice.