Cultural Differences And Translation

The question of the relationship between language and culture, together with that of cultural barriers in translation has drawn an increasing attention of translation researchers. This dissertation is dedicated to a proposal for a study of the translation obstacles between English and Chinese with a cultural approach. Certain stumbling blocks in the translation of the culturally-loaded words are explored. Relative translation strategies are studied in detail and the problem about the translatability of cultural and literary text is expounded as well.The dissertation consists of four chapters. Chapter One is devoted to the discussion about the relationship between language, culture and translation as a basis for the whole thesis. Chapter Two focuses on the cultural gaps between Chinese and English and translation approaches are presented respectively. With the main concern of cultural translation studies as theoretical foundation and guideline for the research design and research methodology of this dissertation, the author in Chapter Three first examines two controversial translation strategies: domestication and foreignization. A tentative conclusion is reached at last that neither of them should be adhered to rigidly. When one way is not feasible, the other can serve as a supplementary method. Besides, the problem of translatability is discussed with the conclusion that a literary text can be both translatable and untranslatable, but at different levels. The last part of Chapter Three is devoted to the discussion of literary fuzziness and translation from the perspective of reader's response.Based on the above-mentioned study, the author in Chapter Four tries to state that translation, a complex task with many extra-linguistic factors involved, should not be considered a sterile linguistic exercise happening in a vacuum, but an act of interculturalcommunication in situation, a matter of making intelligible a whole culture. Thereby, the translator should be of both bilingual and bicultural competence to achieve a satisfactory translation--the conveyance of the total information of the source language by means of the target language.