Culture Facsimile In English-Chinese Literary Translation

In the history of translation, the strategies of domestication and foreignization provoke a flood of research. In the previous decade, translation theorists put more stress on cultural elements and gradually established a concept of cultural translation. Nowadays, more articles emphasizing foreignizaion show up in academic journals on translation. However, foreignization often brings about unconquerable problems in translation practice. As a result, the strategies of culture facsimile are put forward. Culture facsimile refers to the basic criterion of translation, which requires that the meaning, form and style of the source language be precisely expressed in the translation from the aspect of culture. Translators should try to faithfully render the cultural elements in the originals (including the culture-specific language) with the approach of foreignization. As for the translation of the culture-free language, translators should adhere to the norms of the target language.Chapter one is a historical overview of the opinions on translation strategies, from which we may know that translation studies scholars put more emphasis on the translation of culture.Chapter two assumes that the strategies of culture facsimile are preferred in English-Chinese literary translation. The reasons are multifold. First, the features of culture facsimile compared with those of domestication and foreignization single out culture facsimile as preferred strategies in E-C literary translation. Second, translators should establish the concept of cultural translation, and the strategies of culture facsimile conform to and are the practice of the concept of cultural translation. Third, the cultural acceptation on the part of target text readers is possible if well tackled, and the cultural acceptation is dialectic in respect of history, readers' response, and sociopsychology of the target culture. Fourth, culture facsimile is the response to the call of the time.Chapter three further probes into the realization of culture facsimile, including the preconditions and the translation process. The preconditions are focused on therequirements from translators. In the framework of relevance theory, we may take translation to be a cross-culture, cross-language ostensive-inferential cognitive process. To be more accurate, translation involves two ostensive-inferential cognitive processes: in the first process, also called decoding process, the author makes known his intended interpretation, and the translator, as a SL-reader, infers the intended interpretation; thereafter, the translator conies to the second process, also called re-encoding process, where the translator sets off from the author's intended interpretation, makes the assessment of the cultural schema in the original expression, and then re-encodes the intended interpretation into a target language expression.In the re-encoding process, cultural schema plays a vital role. The analysis of the author's set of cultural schemas compared with the TL reader's set of cultural schemas divides the re-encoding process into three conditions:Condition 1: the author's cultural schema involved in the original expression is also shared by the TL reader.Condition 2: the author's cultural schema involved in the original expression is different from that of the TL reader; nevertheless, with the intrusion of the translator, the TL reader can reestablish the required cultural schema with ease.Condition 3: the author's cultural schema involved in the original expression contradicts that of the TL reader's; the reestablishment of the required cultural schema will bring about too much cultural shock and uneasiness, or be unnecessarily disturbing so as to obstruct the fluent decoding process on the part of the TL reader.The translator has to find out a way to render the original expression. In the relevance framework, the translator should ensure that the optimally relevant interpretation of the rendering is no other than the intended interpretation. Therefore, the translator has...