On The Interaction Between Culture And Translation From The Perspective Of Creative Treason In Literary Translation

As for the relationship between culture and translation, quite a lot of translation theorists and experienced translators, home and abroad, have made many insightful statements. Mr. Wang Zuoliang (王佐良) talked about the problem of cultural consciousness of translators in his essay On the Cultural Comparison in Translation. He said: "A translator must be a genuine cultural cultivated person, he should master two languages, and that's true. However, if one knows little about the social cultural knowledge in the language, he wouldn't master a language well. Translators may just deal with specific word, yet what they are facing are two macro cultures." Professor Tan Zaixi (谭载喜) once said: "In the process of translation, the translator's correct comprehension of a certain passage attributes to his/her knowledge on relevant cultures largely. " In his monograph New Perspective on Translation Studies, Professor Xie Tianzhen (谢天振) talked about the latest trend in modern international translation studies, he concluded "three breakthroughs" and "two turns" in the west translation studies, yet both "breakthrough" and "turn" are inseparable from culture. In 1990, a British scholar Susan Bassnett, and a Belgium scholar Andre Lefevere, published their co-edited book Translation, History and Culture, which marks "the cultural turn" of translation. Therefore, translation studies broke through the traditional linguistic comparison between the original and the translated version, and came into a dynamic stage of cultural introspection.Yet culture covers too much and translation study itself is interdisciplinary, which makes it impractical to make a thorough study on the relationship between culture and translation. Thus this thesis adventures to explore the interaction between culture and translation from a new perspective, creative treason in literary translation.This thesis is composed of five chapters.In chapter one, the author analyzes the feature of literary translation and points out that creativity and treason are unavoidable in literary translation. The basic feature of creative treason lies in the fact that it introduces the source text into a reception context totally unexpected by the source language writer. In order to enhance the reader's comprehension of "creative treason", the author cites some scholars' comments in this field.In chapter two, the author gives a detailed analysis of translator's creative treason in literary translation. As to the translator's creative treason, it can be roughly divided into two categories: consciously creative treason and unconsciously creative treason, which embodies individualizedtranslation, mistranslation, deleted translation and edited translation.In chapter three, creative treason on the part of receptor and reception context are well analyzed with suitable examples which lay a solid foundation for the study of the interaction between culture and translation in chapter five.In chapter four, the author makes a brief review on the relationship between culture and translation and introduces the cultural turn of translation studies. Since cultural translation has been regarded as the essence of translation studies after the trend of cultural turn, the author also reviews cultural translation studies both at home and abroad. At the end of this chapter the author points out that previous studies tend to study the relationship between culture and translation from the angle of the impact of cultural factors exerted on translation, yet seldom has researcher studied culture from the perspective of translation.Chapter five is the core of the present thesis. Depending on the introduction of creative treason in literary translation, and the detailed analysis of abundant examples and the relevant review of culture and translation, the author generalizes the impacts of creative treason from the positive and negative aspects. On the one hand, creative treason expands the source language culture and enriches the target language culture, promotes the transmission and understanding between the source language culture and the target language culture, and causes the cultural increment of the translated version; on the other hand, creative treason triggers the loss of cultural information and the twist of cultural image.In the conclusion part, the author points out that former study on the interaction between culture and translation mainly focused on the impacts of culture exerted on translation. In the era of globalization, the relationship between globalization and culture is inseparable, thus we should advocate a "translation turn" in culture study, from which we may study gains and losses of culture information in the process of translation.