On The Translation Of English And Chinese Basic Color Terms From The Perspective Of Susan Bassnett's Cultural Translation Theory

Language and culture are interacted with each other. Language is the carrier of culture, and culture is the track along which language forms and develops. As one of the basic elements of language, vocabulary is the most active and sensitive part, which can directly reflect the social and cultural developments. That is particularly true for color terms. Due to cultural discrepancies, color terms in different languages often result in misunderstandings in cross-cultural communications and also bring about cultural barriers in inter-lingual translation and cultural exchange.After giving a literature review on the study of color terms at home and abroad, the author finds that many of the researches on the translation of color terms lack in a scientific and reasonable theoretical model, which results in that the studies on the culture of color terms are not systematic and thorough enough. With the development of linguistics and translation theories, translation studies have witnessed a "cultural turn". Translation is no longer regarded as a pure cross-linguistic activity, and translators begin to lay more emphases on the comparison and translation of two cultures. Among the advocators of cultural translation, the most outstanding one is Susan Bassnett, whose views on translation provide a more scientific perspective for translation study. Therefore, this thesis employs Bassnett's theories of cultural translation as the theoretical foundation, applying the cultural comparative method to the translation of English and Chinese basic color terms, with a view to propose some practicable translating strategies and methods for dealing with the cultural elements in color terms.As an act of cross-cultural communication, translation is by no means a simple process of decoding and recoding, but an activity of communication; translation should take culture as the translation unit and never be restricted as the description of SL text. Because of the differences between languages, the SL and the TL can not be equivalent both linguistically and culturally. In addition to being faithful to the original, translation must be able not only to enlighten TL readers to recognize foreign cultural elements but also to make the translated version intelligible and acceptable. So, translation should make the SL culture and the TL culture equivalent in function, namely cultural functional equivalence, which demands that translators should be both bilingual and bicultural. That is also true for the translation of English and Chinese basic color terms.Owing to the same physical mechanism of perception and the same living environment, there are lots of similarities between English and Chinese basic color terms; but because of the differences in such cultural factors as national psychology, social background, natural environment and history, the connotations of English and Chinese color terms vary from each other. In view of this, the equivalence and unequivalence between English and Chinese basic color terms can be classified into four kinds of forms:equivalence, referring to the case that the conceptual meaning and the connotative meaning are generally equivalent between English and Chinese basic color terms; partial equivalence, indicating the situation that some English and Chinese basic color terms are equivalent in the connotative meaning but unequivalent in the face value, i.e. the conceptual meaning; unequivalence, implying English and Chinese color terms'associative meanings are far beyond the communicative value of the conceptual meaning; zero equivalence, meaning that there is no equivalent of color terms or expressions in a language can be found in another one.According to different circumstances, several cultural translation methods can be used. For the equivalence, it is possible to use the method of literal translation. For the proper names with basic color terms, it is suitable to employ the method of transliteration. Sometimes, literal translation alone may result in misunderstandings, and then the method of annotation can be adopted to maintain the original color images. For the unequivalence or the color expressions that can not be found in the TL, the method of free translation is necessary. For the partial equivalence, it is a good choice to use substitution. What's more, the method of adding or omitting can also be applied to the unequivalence and the color terms in SL which have nothing to do with color or have no equivalents in the TL.During the translating process, if the translator can be skilled in these methods, the cultural information must be conveyed more accurately and effectively. Of course, there are still some limitations that need to be improved in this thesis. However, the author hopes that the results of this research can provide a theoretical guidance for inter-lingual translation, language teaching, and so on, thus promoting cross-cultural communications.