Strategies And Practice Of Cultural Translation

Traditionally, translation is regarded as an activity of converting one language into another. In recent years, translation theorists begin to take it as an activity of cultural exchange, that is, it is not only a linguistic transformation, but essentially a cultural communication.The first chapter of this thesis gives a literature review over the study of translation theory at home and abroad from ancient times to the present time and points out that much attention is being paid to culture in Western translation studies. Chinese translation theorists should follow this tendency so as to communicate with Western theorists on an equal plane. Many Chinese translation theorists and translators have done a lot of work in this field. Then, what is culture? What's the relationship between culture and translation? The second chapter puts forward the definitions of culture and analyzes the relationship between culture and language and the relationship between culture and translation. This chapter also discusses the importance of culture in translation and raises some problems arising in translating cultural elements.Theory and principles are definitely important to solve the problems in translation. Chapter three, on the basis of discussing Nida's functional equivalent theory, points out that Nida's theory, to some degree, is workable but cannot be adopted as the main guiding theory. Then, this chapter studies translation principle from the following two angles: 1.from the purpose of translation, that is, culture exchange and culture transplant, foreignization is preferred; 2.from the angle of perlocutionary analogy, sometimes the principle of domestication is also needed, otherwise, if target language readers can't understand the rendering, the goal of cultural communication would fail. However, the principle of foreignization should be put in the first place. The thesis draws this conclusion by reviewing the Chinese translation history with many examples to show the advantages and disadvantages of the two principles.As peoples all over the world have many similar demands and live on the sameplanet, most cultural elements are translatable. However, in cross-cultural translation, especially between those cultures with great difference like Chinese and English, many cultural elements surface from the confrontation of cultural deposits, making it impossible to capture the relationship of the source text to the source culture in the target text. Thus, problems in translating cultural elements arise. Based on the two principles in chapter three, chapter four proposes six basic methods to solve those problems, namely, literal translation, zero translation (including transliteration and transference), annotation, contextual amplification, conversion and paraphrase. Many examples are given in five categories (ecological culture, material culture, religious culture, linguistic culture and social culture), which are divided by Eugene A. Nida. The application of the six techniques shows that cultural elements are translatable between Chinese and English cultures. But there are still some limitations of translatability because of the great difference between the two cultures. In this chapter, the thesis also analyzes the advantages and defects of the six skills.On the basis of the study of cultural translation, the thesis in its fifth chapter puts forward some implications for translation practice, that is, a translator should have the awareness of culture, an equal attitude toward different cultures and adopt foreignizing methods to preserve the original images and convey the original cultural connotation as far as possible so as to obtain a good translation.