Translational Imperfectness:from A Whorfian Perspective

The aim of this thesis is to seek the innermost reason that contributes to translational imperfectness. The thesis begins with rethinking and redefining the concepts of language, thought and culture, and then, by drawing heavily upon relevant theories of Benjamin Lee Whorf, analyzes the interrelationship between the three, which is held to be much closer than usually expected; in fact, this thesis holds that, language, thought and culture are one and the same and form an inseparable whole. In order to invalidate the present misinterpretations about Whorf s theories on language, culture and thought, as well as to get the first-hand information, this thesis devotes a large proportion of pages to rereading Whorf in the original. During the course of reviewing and reinterpreting Whorf in the original, the author discovers a fundamental Whorfian notion of "rapport", which refers to the patterned relations between words and morphemes, and which has been so far generally ignored whereas the author holds it to be crucial since it constitutes the very theoretical basis for the well-known and much-debated principle of linguistic relativity. When applying the Whorfian perspective, i.e. Whorf s principle of linguistic relativity and other related theories, to various translational problems, this thesis not only proves that Whorf s principle of linguistic relativity can offer us an in-depth insight into the nature of trasnaltional phenomena, but also shows that translational imperfectness is just inevitable and is doomed by the lingua-cognitive incommensurability inherent between different languages.