Acculturation, Text Misreadings, And Translation Strategies

Translation Studies as an identified discipline had its birth in the historic 1976 conference in Leuven, Belgium. Research in translation, however, had already come a long way right before this epoch-making occasion. Take China for example. Her most valuable theories had grown out of the protracted activities of Buddhist sutras translation starting from Han till Song and Yuan dynasties. Remarks on translation can also be found in different times that followed, such as Xu Guangqi, Li Zhizao, Ma Jianzhong, and Yan Fu, who were all renowned for their propositions on sci-tech translations. In respect to literary translation, there were such virtuosos, among others, as Wang Guowei who wrote Preface to the Translated Version "On Pipa", and Su Manshu who was famous for his poetic renderings.In the past 100 years, however, the West has outshone the East to a great extent, with its unparalleled productivity and diversity in translation theories. In 1900's-1930's, translation was once regarded as interpretation which might necessarily reconstitute and transform the foreign texts. The years of 1940's-1950's were, so to speak, dominated by the crucial issue of translatability, and equivalence, too, was the demanding concept as found in most theories from 1960's to 1970's.At the end of the 1970's, Translation Studies came to gain a worldwide recognition and investigation. Translation theories in traditional sense have been infused with new qualities. Growing attention was then paid to the social, economic and even political functions of translation, and to the cultural strategies and priority of values of the culture transmitters, instead of constant obsession with the deep-ingrained concepts like equivalence, literal translation/free translation. Translation Studies has been observed against a much broader context associated with construction of nationality and transfusion of fresh blood into national culture, and it has come to be characterized by cultural turn, theoretical permeation, and interdisciplinary integration. "Translation" is no longer confined to the simple, mechanical and passive operation of rendering from source texts to target ones. Rather, the cultural transmitter has been awarded with the value of relative autonomywhich admits of one's cultural choice based on his own beliefs and values before deciding on the translation strategies and carrying out the supposed process of translating. In other words, subjective interpretations have been allowed for a foreign culture while involved in the introduction of the source culture into the target culture, or acculturation. These operations, strongly stamped with hermeneutic subjectivity, have come to be necessarily suggestive of "translation" as it is and ought to be. PCnowledge of these points would undoubtedly aid our understanding of culture, our development of cultural insights, and our construction of cultural strategies. The focus of the present study, then, is on translation in the latter sense, i.e., acculturation, aiming to shed light on how to provide theoretical insights and rationale for the promotion of our cultural entity and the subject—Translation Studies.Just because the cultural turn has come to be one of the three features of the present Translation Studies, a territory with huge potential for further development, this paper, therefore, is intended to deal with the subject of translation from the perspective of cultural studies, on the basis of an empirical insight into the translations of the Buddhist expressions as found in the English version of Journey to the West. The Buddhist terms in the Chinese version are collected and summarized, and then are their translations in the English version. The former task involves observations on the diachronic evolution of connotations of the Buddhist terms in the Chinese context or its semantic field attached to the Chinese soil, so as to demonstrate the cultural interactions, translations, and semantic shifts within the Chinese community, a phenomenon belonging to intra-lingual translation. The latter task admits of a close examination of the diction of the translator, so as to analyze his translation strategies, value preference, and how the source text has been decoded, rewritten and deviated from the original values, a phenomenon belonging to inter-lingual translation. A comparative study in these two categories is expected to dawn on, to a certain degree, the inherent interrelationships between acculturation, text misreadings, and translation strategies.Consequently, the whole thesis is designed to comprise seven chapters in all. The first chapter reviews the evolution of translation endeavors, both oriental and occidental, with introduction of some influential concepts and the impact of Buddhist sutra translation on the Chinese scholarships. A general classification and comment on the statistics of the Buddhism-related terms in the novel Journey is also presented here. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 are devoted to the study of the four key terms respectively: dao 道, yuan 缘, shanzai 善哉, and chart 禅. These four chapters have similar structural design. Each of them starts with the intra-lingual inquiry into the evolution of the term in question within the context of the Chinese language and culture, with an eye to the related text misreading and acculturation. Then comes the inter-lingual perspective. It is intended to, through comparative analysis with the English version, demonstrate how the translator misreads the source text, what strategy is used in translating, and how the textual operation under the guidance of such strategy conveys a distorted cultural landscape to the target audience. Based on previous findings, Chapter 6 expands the focus on the four representative key terms further to the overall issue of Buddhist literature translating, which is an important branch of Translation Studies. Deeper discussions are made about text misreading, acculturation and translation strategy, through a synthetic application of theories in Translation Studies and Linguistics, especially the propositions of cultural construction and textual grid by Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere. Finally a Sankritization strategy is proposed to deal with Buddhist literature translation. Chapter 7 summarizes the interrelationships among the trinity, and comes up with an integrated proposition based on Sanskritization.To sum up, the application of theoretical scholarship of Translation Studies and reference to translation methods in specific translation operations are involved in this paper, serving to account for adequate motivations for the occurrence of cultural misreading and barriers to adequate communication in the process of acculturation. Due emphasis is given to the mutual access among Buddhism, the Chinese culture and the misreading, with an effort to highlight the value preferences and cultural...