On Cultural Elements In The Translation Of Non-Literary Works

As a cross-linguistic, cross-cultural and cross-social communicative activity, translation is not only the process of translating from one language into another activity but also a cultural transferring one, which inevitably involves the manipulation of cultural elements. American translation theorist Venuti proposed a new pair of concepts as translation strategies (domestication and foreignization) last century, which led to a prevailing surge of wide-ranged and heated discussion and study.Currently, these discussions and studies are mainly focused on the issues in literary translation and little attention is paid to non-literary translation. Although achievements on cultural translation have been made in certain registers, over-all study in this field has been limited.Chinese history of scientific translation has proved the existence of the manipulation of cultural elements in non-literary translation and the translating process has actually been the one of cultural transplantation, the influence of which is no less than the one through literary translation. As far as the application of translation strategies is concerned, if Venuti's terminologies are used, foreignization actually went side by side with domestication while foreignization is much less applied at the present stage. This change is mainly caused by three factors. First, the accumulation of cultural exchange let target language readers know much more about source language culture. Scientific translation at the early stage usually involved an introduction of a brand-new subject, also a brand-new cultural background, which led to more application of foreignization. Contemporary scientific translation, however, mainly involved new theories and approaches of an existing system, which contains less exotic cultural elements. Therefore, domestication outweighs foreignization. Second, the amount, the speed of the replacement and the spread of information have been increased in an accelerating way, which requires translator groups topay more attention to the translation speed and readers' preference of the information translated...