Translation Studies In The Cultural Perspective

The essay defines translation as a cross-cultural communication, especially translation between linguistically remote and culturally distinct languages such as Chinese and English. First of all, the author probes into the linguistic tradition in translation studies, which is due to the kinship in cultural origin and language structure among Western languages. Translation studies in the cultural perspective are to bridge Chinese culture and Western culture. The author tries to construct cultranslation from three dimensions, namely, culture in the perspective of translatology, the scope of cultranslation and the representation of cultranslation. In terms of culture in the perspective of translatology, the author expounds the relationship between language and culture and the cultural information in language, regarding language as the main way of representation of cultural ontology. In respect of the scope of cultranslation, the essay analyzes the ontological features of culture, namely, the feature of nationality, heredity, interchangeability and compatibility, elaborating the homogeneity and heterogeneity of language and culture. As far as the representation of cultranslation is concerned, theauthor puts forward the adaptable principle, the scientific principle and the esthetic principle, summarizing five basic models to tackle cultural elements in translation, namely, the go-ahead model, the block model, the annotation model, the integration model and the adaptation model. In conclusion, the author insists that translation studies in the cultural perspective have no intention of blurring the contention about whether translation is science or art, which only provides a new vision for the study of translation.