Cultural Misreading In Literary Translation

A systematic discussion of cultural misreading has long been neglected in the theories of literary translation. It is largely due to the deficiency of academic research and the marginal place of literary translation. The thesis attempts to make a close examination of the liability and inevitability of cultural misreading in literary translation, with the aim to pinpoint the objective and subjective causes for cultural misreading. It is maintained in the thesis that linguistic and cultural differences together with the subjectivity of translators are the main causes of cultural misreading. Fundamentally, the study of cultural misreading will help literary translators avoid its negative effects if possible.Linguistic differences demonstrated in lexical gaps as well as semantic and syntactic differences build up certain barriers for translators to understand the relevant cultural elements. Furthermore, cultural differences have an essential bearing upon literary translation and most problems encountered in the process of translation are concerned with the core of culture, namely the ways of thinking and cultural values including religions, terms of address and relations of kinship and so forth, all of which vary tremendously from Chinese to English, and as a result bring about cultural gaps in literary translation. On the other hand, the subjective status of the translator may also undermine the understanding of cultural factors in literary translation. However, the translator's subjective role has long been denied in literary translation. The investigation into the philosophical approach to translation theory will afford us a unique perspective to review the subjectivity of the translator in literary translation. In the perspective of Reader-Response Theories, Reception Aesthetics and Hermeneutics, the process of translation starts with the reading of the text while the translator plays an indispensable part in reinterpreting the original text. It is stated in this thesis that translators can and will unavoidably manifest in their translated versions their subjectivity in the process of recuperating the source text's content flavored by the culture, from which the source text comes. It is liable then for the translator to misread the source culture with their subjectivity in literary translation.