Cultural Elements In Texts With Different Language Functions

The relationship between culture and language is a pertinent for linguists and translators. Under the globalized environment, cross culture communication is omnipresent in modern society, and thereby the role that translation plays in various areas, like world trade and international tourism, has become more and more important. Bilingual instructions to some export or import products, brilliant Oscar films with Chinese captions, and foreign versions of best selling books are seen everywhere. However, when comparing the original texts with their translations, it is revealed that cultural discrepancies by the Source language and the Target language bring more gaps than the purely linguistic differences which impact the accuracy of translating. The effect of cultural elements on translation mainly centers on its restriction and infiltration. This thesis aims at articulating which kinds of translation reflect the restriction of the cultural elements and in which kinds of translations infiltration can be found. Withal, the author makes the endeavor to handle the translations to texts with different language functions based on the approaches of semantic translation and communicative translation.To start with, the thesis offers an analysis of culture and translation and their relationship and presents the fact that as numerous and various texts are translated, cultural discrepancies are found to be a great barrier in translating. It then calls for translators to pay keener attention to cultural discrepancies other than linguistic differences between the source and target languages.In retrospect, translation approaches and theories both at home and abroad, to a certain degree, have limitations when handling cultural elements. The main cause lies in the lack of consideration of different text types of the original language, and the corresponding methods of dealing with cultural elements in those different text types. Therefore, the significance of finding out an appropriate approach to cultural elements in different text types is deduced.Under the assumption that translations can be classified by their function intothree general types according to pragmatic theory: the expressive, the evocative, and the informative, the thesis attempts to illustrate to what extent the cultural elements are restricted and infiltrated in translations with different functions.The core, characteristic and requirements of different functional translations are mentioned to clarify that cultural elements play different roles in translations with different language functions. To support the classification, translations of literary works, tourist publicities, news reports and persuasive advertisements are analyzed as examples.To render cultural elements in the most appropriate way, a large portion of the thesis is devoted to discussing different methods of the three major text types. Drawing upon Peter Newmark's theory which shows much concern on text types and translation effect, semantic and communicative translation is considered a major step toward creating a successful translation.