On Chinese Literary Translation From The Perspective Of Cultural Presupposition

This thesis is a tentative study of Chinese Literature Translation from the perspective of Cultural Presupposition.Presupposition, as a notion borrowed from philosophy, has been a controversial issue in the linguistic field since 1970. In Intercultural pragmatics, cultural presupposition refers to a different cultural background knowledge of speaker and hearer, or a system of culture-specific beliefs built upon and developed through the life experience of members of different communities, which may become a necessity or, for lack of it, an obstacle for the adequate comprehension. Since culture is not only a linguistic transfer, but also a cultural transfer, cultural presuppositions are inevitable in the process of translation. They merit special attention from translators because they can substantially and systematically affect their interpretation of facts and events in the source text,In this paper, the author will make a literature review of presupposition and clarify the definition of cultural presupposition adopted, and expound on the relationship between translation and cultural presupposition as a cultural-specific phenomenon. Then misunderstanding and mistranslation in translation works will be observed from the perspective of cultural presupposition. The author considers major categorizations of culture and examines how these elements help breed presuppositions that affect the translators decoding and translating of the original message. Finally the author attempts to make a tentative study on Chinese literary translation from the perspective of cultural presupposition, to study whether the translators have fully considered different cultural presuppositions between the source and target culture and rendered them adequately in the target text for target readers to understand properly. Thereupon, conclusions are drawn that cultural presuppositions should receive due attention from translators, and should be carefully considered and handled according to specific contexts.