The Intercultural Communicative Barriers On The Part Of A Translator

By introducing the notion of conununication and culture, the amhor ofthis paPer intends to show their inner relationship wth translation. Cultural tum andcomrnunicative focus bring tfanslation studies into the field of interculturalcommwhcation. Intercultural conununication is "communication betWeen people Whoseculture perceptions and symbol systems are distinct enough to alter the communicationevent." Translation is intercultural communication because it, on the one hand, containsaIl the major elements of communication, on the other hand, can be traced back toilltercultural conununicative behavior.Thus most of problems and difficulties in tfanslation actUally transform intoifltercultWal communicative barriers, Which translators should adopt special strategies toovercome. There are thIee major strategies(understanding cultural default, improvingintercultural awareness, and strengthening cornmunicative competence which includesgrammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competence. These strategiescannot be leamed thIough the language itself but need inteniional study by translators.By grasping these strategies, a tTanslator can overcome illtercultural communicativebarriers in a relative but not absolute way.The paPer takes some poems in Hong Lou Meng as a case study and chooses twoauthoritative English versions of Hong Lou Meng: one by Yang Hsien-Yi and the otherby David Hawkes. The paPer classifies cornmunication into intercultUIal andifltracultural. The translator's native language and culture are taken into account. Thecommunication between Yang Hsien-yi and source text amhor Cao Xue-qing belongs tointracultUIal one because they share the same cultural background and communicationbetween Yang and TL readers belong to interculttoal one due to their different cultural1 lbackgrounds. The case is just opposite with Hawkes.ComParatively speaking, intercultural conununication is more difficult to handle.The paPer discovers that the intercultural conununicative barriers can be sununed intofour major categories, Which are langUage barriers, value system barriers, thinkingpattern barriers and religious belief barriers. By comPaxing tWo versions, the authorfinds that Hawkes' version has reached better communicative effects due to threeaPproaches in his translation f modemization, deculturalization and domestication.Modernization is to change ancient Chinese to modern English, which is TL textoriented. DecultUralization is to desalinate, or simply say weaken cultural information,which is TL cultllIe-oriented. And domestication is to "bring athor back home", Whichis TL readers-oriented. These three approaches, in a certain degree, reduce the culturalelemellts in target text, but they really colltribllte to better corn-municative effects.In conclusion, it is a more scieniific way to study tTanslation from the iniercultWalcomrnunicative perspective. Target text-oriented translation can achieve bettercommunicative effects. However, there sometimes exist cofitYadictions between bettercommunicative effects and the loss of cultural information. A translator's task is toba1ance between them and do his best to compensate fOr the lost information resultingfrom the allempts to achieve better communicative effects.