A Cultural Translation Study Of Contemporary American Ethnic Women Novels

In the process of diversification of world cultural patterns, translation is a necessary vehicle for cultural communication and transmission. Translation is not only a way of language transformation, but also a way of transmitting cultural information and promoting social progress and establishing culture features. Translation plays important role in promotion of cultural communication. In a sense, we may say translation study is an approach to different culture. In western country, translation studies and culture research present parallel development track. In 1900, Susan Bassnett and AndréLefevere propose the concept of cultural translation in Translation History and Culture. Translation should take culture as translational unit, rather than discourse. Translation should not confine to the description of the source text, but in the functional equivalence of target culture. The focal point of translation studies should turn to readers from the author and to the target culture from the original culture. The translational method from the view of translator and target culture unfolds a new field of vision and provides a novel theory of interpretation for translation studies.Since novels are integration of language phenomenon, sentence characteristic, rhetorical means and ideographic approach, many researchers are fascinated with it. Language, as carrier of cultural transmission, exists in literature text. However, fuzziness, an innate property of language, also slips into literature and becomes a unique language phenomenon, fuzzy language. The fuzzy language refers to those words whose connotation is unclear and denotation is indeterminate. It divides into two types: fuzziness on noumenon and fuzziness on cognition. Cultural Default is one of the reasons which cause the fuzzy language. In literary works, differences between two cultures decide the existence of cultural default. Cultural default is defined as absence of relevant cultural background knowledge shared by the author and his/her intended readers. In fact, the study of literary works from the perspective of cultural translation is a process of digging cultural connotation of fuzzy language and filling up reader's cultural vacancy.In translation practice, Gayatri C. Spivak proposes her unique translation theory, namely translation is not a transitional process of a section of meaning or a transitional process of complete meaning, but a silence reading. In the reading process, translator's inner self communicates with Other about language and culture. Spivak emphasizes that translation is reading, reading is translation, the aim of which is to show her identification with Self and her respect for Otherness. This requires that translators should not understand the work from language level, but also access to the cultural context of the source text in order to surrender to the source language. Only in this way, the distinct boundary line between the subject and object, source language and target language, self and Other will disappear in the process of reading. Consequently, translators are able to surrender to the source text, and then step over the boundary between self and Other.Using translation as the means of analysis and Spivak's translational theory as the theoretical framework, the thesis will study the translation strategy of fuzzy language in Contemporary American Ethnic Women Novels from three levels, i.e. fuzzy language on language level, fuzzy language on rhetoric level and fuzzy language on culture level. The thesis will focus on the fuzzy language caused by cultural default that result from reader's limited cognition about foreign culture, rather than the fuzzy language caused by unclear meaning of word itself. By means of carefully reading, the author found that fuzzy language widely exists in the Contemporary American Ethnic Women Novels and became an indispensable language feature. Firstly, the author classifies fuzzy language and then studies translation strategy of fuzzy language from language level, rhetorical level and cultural level. Secondly, the author will explore how the translator reduces fuzziness of language, and how to establishing the optimal relevance between source text and readers to achieve the best reading effective. The special genre and author's unique cultural identity makes texts fill with strong ethnic cultural color. The cultural translation keeps a watchful eye on the special cultural color that contains in language. The cultural translation is the best perspective to study cultural connotation hide in the Contemporary American Ethnic Women Novels...