An Adaptation-theoretic Perspective On Cultural Context And Pragmatic Translation

This paper builds on Verschueren's theory of adaptation to approach the effects cultural context has made on translation criteria and translation research. The author has made a review of the contextual correlates of adaptation and attempted to utilize the theory to guide translation. The author holds the view that a translator must make a dynamic, rather than static, adaptation to the context of the original language to select the translated language, thereby, to satisfy, to the greatest extent, the requirements of translation.The paper has first made approaches to the significant impacts cultural context has imposed on the selection of the lexical meaning in translation. The author points out that a translator must adapt to the socio-political cultural context, religious culture, ethnological culture, natural geography, different thought patterns, thus make an appropriate selection of the lexical meaning in translation. Only by so doing, can a translator achieve the nearly equivalent pragmatic translation and make the version mirror the style of the original language.From the point of view of theory of adaptation, the author has also explored the interrelationship between adaptation to cultural context and translation strategies and revealed that adaptation to cultural context plays a positive role in the concrete translation strategies such as literal translation, free translation and meaning compensation in translation. A translator must surmount the differences existing in different cultural contexts, make an active adaptation to the Chinese-English cultural differences, and fill up cultural default in translation. Consequently, he or she can refrain from the barriers of transmitting the cultural information and achieve the optimal translation.Translation is not only the transference of language, but also a transmission of cultural information. The task for a translator is to remove the obstacles of the cultural exchange appearing in the two languages. For that reason, a translator must strain to learn Chinese and English well. What's more, he must acquaint himself with the Chinese-English culture. A translator must experience, analyze, straighten out, absorb and make an active adaptation to the cultural information, hence make an equivalent transference between the original language and the version and achieve the equivalent pragmatic translation.