Translation Of Cultural Information In Literary Works

Although the topics about literal translation and free translation have long been discussed, and although there are many works on the strategies dealing with the cultural information, a very important factor in translation has been neglected. That factor is the reader. The Reception Theory, whose main proponents are Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser of Germany, is a theory of literary criticism and has great influence on the western trends of thought on literature. Different from the traditional literary theories, it shifts the literary criticism from the perspectives of the text and writer to that of the reader and gives new life to literary criticism. Enlightened by this theory, many translators adopted the strategy of literal translation and believed it is the right way to engage the readers' horizon of expectation.However, many readers find that some of the literal translation is very difficult to understand, and subsequently tend to lose interest in the translated version. Therefore, translators should take readers' ability of comprehension into consideration as well. According to Eugene Nida's Functional Equivalence theory, the aim of translation is that "the readers of a translated text should be able to comprehend it to the point that they can conceive of how the original readers of the text must have understood and appreciated it." (Nida, 1993:316)Therefore, in order to let the target language readers have the same comprehension as the source language readers, free translation should also be adopted and much information, especially the cultural information, has to be altered. However, such strategy sometimes impairs the cultural information in the text and is not suitable at a time when the global communication is developing rapidly.Cultural communication plays a significant role in the globalization and literature is a very important carrier of such information. This thesis mainly focuses on the cultural information in the literary work and tries to syncretize the above-mentioned two theories in order to find a better way to deal with the problem of literal and free translation. The author categorizes the cultural information in the literary works andprovides several models of translation accordingly. This thesis has four chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction to the two theories and their enlightenment to the translation strategies; chapter 2 discusses the translation strategies from the perspective of the culture; chapter 3 is about the syncretism of the two theories and chapter 4 gives several models of the translation of cultural information in literary works. The author has no intention to draw a clear line between the strategies of literal and free translation, but attempts to provide a new angle for translation.