On E-C Translation Of Biblical Allusion From A Sociosemiotic Perspective

The Bible, as a cultural and religious classic in the western world, has exerted profound and far reaching influence on the western society. As an embodiment of such a religious and cultural classic, the biblical allusion has always been widely quoted in various areas in the western world;even in China, some biblical allusions have also become one part of the Chinese language. As the biblical allusion is abundant in cultural connotations, it has become a difficult problem for the translator to transfer the culturally-loaded information in biblical allusions. Since there hasn't been any systematic study on the translation of biblical allusions, this paper attempts to discuss how to handle cultural load in the translation of biblical allusions from the sociosemiotic perspective.According to sociosemiotics, translation is a transformation between two sign systems. Translation is an encoding and decoding process which takes place in the whole social context. Translation involves not only the transformation between languages but also various non-linguistic sign systems. Translating is translating meaning;translating in essence is the communication between cultures. Meaning and function should be considered as two indispensable factors in assessing the quality of the translation. In the light of sociosemiotics, the translation practice proceeds from the meanings and functions of language and gives equal attention to the referential meaning and pragmatic meaning. Together with importance attached to the functions of language and the linguistic meaning constructed by the inner relation between verbal signs, sociosemiotic translation method can help the translator reproduce the meanings and functions at various levels, thus achieving "correspondence in meaning and similarity in function". As the sociosemiotic approach incorporates other social, cultural and religious factors into translation, it has provided for the translator a much wider scope, which enables the translator to analyze the culturally-loaded information in biblical allusions in a more comprehensive way.