Linguistic-Cultural Vacancy And Translation Strategies

Regarding translation as a creative activity of transference between two different languages and cultures, this paper makes a tentative research of the vacancy between English and Chinese from both linguistic and cultural angles and tries to find some effective strategies for tackling this problem in translation.Language, as an important component of the cultural system, reflects and transmits culture. Different languages mirror different cultural traits, which are reflected in the most vivid and concentrated form in the linguistic-cultural vacancy between different languages.Vacancy, which result from linguistic and cultural disparities between different languages, is a very important phenomenon in intercultural communication. As the ultimate reflection of heterology between languages and cultures, it poses great headaches in translation. In the 1980s, IUSorokin, a Russian scholar and some other scholars pointed out: Eliminating "vacancy" in translating is a very important step in interpreting a foreign text. That's to say, the key task of translation is to crack down these barriers and reduce the differences originating from different language patterns and cultural deposits, successfully achieving the exchange and transference of languages and cultures.With regard to bridging the gaps between English and Chinese, we shouldn't be confined to the idea of translatability or untranslatability, but have a more comprehensive and dialectical attitude. On the one hand, language is translatable, because there are only two types of things under the sun: the known and the to-be-known(or the not-known-yet).The retrospection of human evolution and social development brings us to the fact that with the development of science and technology and the enhancement of the human power of perception, the to-be-known will eventually be turned into the known. That's to say, human being's cognition of the whole objective world is not at all a fantasy, but just a matter of time. Translation, including transferring the message conveyed in linguistic and cultural vacancy, as one type of social activity andcommunicative in nature, is certainly no exception. On the other hand, because of the differences in geographical conditions,social conventions, language patterns,and modes of thinking, the translator's deficient translating skills and the TL readers' limited powers of perception, language sometimes is not completely translatable. However with the development of society, the deepening of cultural exchanges ,and the creative contribution of translators, untranslatability can be transformed into translatability. So the idea of "not everything can be translated" should undergo some modification and change to "not everything can be translated at present".This paper consists of four parts. The introduction concerns the essence of translation and its relationship with language and culture as well as the important role of both linguistic and cultural elements in translation, stressing that the greater the cultural distance is, the more difficulties it poses and the harder the translator is put to crack the nut. Chapter 1 gives the definition of vacancy and classifies it into two groups: linguistic vacancy and cultural vacancy, then analyses the characteristics of vacancy, which give rise to barriers in translation. Chapter 2 discusses the translatability of linguistic and cultural vacancy and its limits , then analyses the reasons for translatability and its limits. Chapter3 addresses the ways to reduce the limits of translatability of vacancy between English and Chinese. Both guiding principles and translation strategies are suggested, with consideration of the relativity of vacancy and the choosing of translation strategies.From the above discussion, a conclusion is arrived at: when a translator comes across insurmountable barriers caused by linguistic and cultural vacancy, what he should strive for is neither formal correspondence on the grammatical level, nor meaning correspondence on the semantic level but rather functional equivalence on the pragmatic level; meanwhile he should effectively reduce the limits of translatability by building into the necessary redundancy. Furthermore, as languages and cultures are constantly developing and changing, and so is linguistic and cultural vacancy, translators should take a dialectical and...