A Study Of Cultural Factors In Translation And Their Strategies

With the advancement of science and technology, the development of society and the wide spread of information, there is more exchange and integration between Eastern and Western cultures, to which translation is indispensable. Translation is a sort of transformation between languages as well as an intercultural communication. Language and culture are closely related and both aspects must be considered for translation. Bassnett likens language to "the heart within the body of culture", pointing out that "the surgeon, operating on the heart, cannot neglect the body that surrounds it, so the translator treats the text in isolation from the culture at his peril" (Bassnett 1992:14).Traditional translation studies have always emphasized on linguistic analyses and textual comparisons, but less researched into concerned cultural factors. This thesis tries to explore what cultural factors influence the translation and how to deal with these factors from a cultranslation perspective.The thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter serves as an overview of cultranslation both in the West and in China. In 1990, Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere first suggested "cultural turn in translation" which argues that the basic unit of translation is not word, not sentence, not even text, but culture. In the following decades, "cultural turn" became the trend in the academic world. In China, though translation has a long history, the study has always centered on the level of language and literature. So there is an urgent need to make a shift toward culture.The second chapter mainly introduces the cultranslation theory and the relationship among language, culture and translation. No language can exist unless it is steeped in the context of culture; and no culture can exist which does not have at its center the structure of natural language. Translators must pay attention to the cultural factors and have profound cultural awareness.Chapter three and Chapter four are the central parts of this thesis, explaining how to identify and deal with cultural factors in translation. Cultural factors surface from the confrontation of cultural deposits in the process of translating from one language toanother, making it sometimes difficult to capture the relationship of the source text to the source culture. These factors include mainly some culture-specific expressions. Approaches to cultural factors involved in translation may be divided into two methods: source culture-oriented foreignization and target culture-oriented domestication. Under this frame, the author proposes some practical strategies like literal translation, substitution, paraphrase, annotation and omission, using cultural-specific metaphors as example.Finally there is a conclusion. A translator should know foreign culture as well as the culture of his own people. Moreover, a translator should make continuous comparisons between the two cultures because translation equivalence in its very sense should be matched in meanings, functions, scopes and feelings in the two cultures. Thus translation can function as a bridge over different cultures.