Tentative Probing Into Cultural Mistranslation

The traditional translation studies holds "faithfulness" or "equivalence" as the only or even supreme criterion. Under the guidance of this criterion, in the early period of the translation studies, the deviation from the original form and content is taken as mistranslation. Then with the development of translation studies, the "faithfulness" criterion acknowledges the linguistic form of the target text needn't to be equivalent with the original, but the content should be faithful to the original. Accordingly, mistranslation becomes the most forceful weapon to attack the translator. During the translation process, the translator is the servant of the original author, the "best" translation is the reproduction of the original text without any traces of deviation or betray. Consequently, a small degree of deviation from the original could be denounced as mistranslation and the phenomenon of mistranslation is in universal existence. Since the "culture turn" in 1970s in translation studies, the common sense towards translation has changed greatly: translating activity is a complex human activity, it is not only an activity of linguistic transference, but also the communication of cultures. Translation never takes place in a vacuum but is restricted by all kinds of socio-cultural factors. So it is unreasonable to denounce the mistranslation for its little deviation from the original text on the linguistic level. The correct way of doing should be examining it in a broad socio-cultural environment. We take the mistranslations which result from cultural factors as cultural mistranslations in this paper, and what should be required is to analyze the causes of them objectively and then take corresponding attitudes, instead of denying them completely.This present paper takes cultural mistranslation as its research subject because of the fact that whatever translation should be influenced more or less by the two languages and cultures involved. It has been in an uncontrolled trend to study various cultural factors influencing translation in contemporarytranslation studies. But up to now, there is no final conclusion about the definition of cultural mistranslation, in this paper, cultural mistranslation refers to the deviation from the original caused by cultural factors or the mistranslation caused by the translator's cultural incompetence or lack of cross-cultural awareness. Cultural mistranslation can further fall into two kinds in accordance with the subjective purposes of the translator, namely intentional and unintentional cultural mistranslation, and the latter is the focal point of this thesis. In this paper, some basic concepts of functional approach are introduced into the investigation of the inevitability and rationality of cultural mistranslation under the influences of the two cultures involved in translation, and therefore, cultural mistranslation should be accepted with common understandings, instead of putting it to death without examining the causes. The research of cultural mistranslation is not the final end of this paper, the author's intention is to introduce some new concepts into our traditional views on translation with the intention of enriching our understanding on the criterion of translation criticism. The mode of our traditional translation criticism is too mechanic and rigid, "faithfulness" should not be the only criterion for our translation. Our mode of thinking should change gradually and develop with the physical circumstances and furthermore, leave more room for the development of the translation criterion.