The Study Of Translation Of Popular Modern-Chinese Sayings Into English

Translation is a cross-language and cross-culture communication. It plays a very important role in the communication between different language speaking groups. It has fascinated so many scholars throughout history that they have made profound studies of it.This thesis starts with Nida's idea on translation: "For truly successful translating, biculturalism is even more important than bilingualism.", briefly tracking back the debates on literal or free translation throughout history in the East and the West, the author states the interrelationship between language and culture, translation and culture and points out that translation involves not only two languages but two cultures as well. Accordingly, the transference of cultural contents from one language into another is inevitable. All nations have their own way of living, their own traditions and customs, so these specific things will certainly find their way into the language, which may carry features of different cultures. Therefore, rendering only the linguistic forms from one language into another is inadequate, because some of the cultural connotations would be neglected. Thus, great importance has been attached to the study of translation from the cultural perspective.With comparing the differences between Chinese and English, the author of this thesis makes systematic study of Chinese-English translation from intercultural perspective through indicating how to translate popular modern-Chinese sayings into English with a lot of examples. On the basis of the two strategies of translation theory: foreignization and domestication, the thesis author classifies the examples of C-E translations according the literal and free translation, pointing out that what is most important is that a translator must be well acquainted with both cultures in addition to languages and apply his or her cultural awareness to the entire translation process.At last, the thesis author makes the conclusion that translation is closely related to and strongly influenced by culture. However, it is considered that, to some extent, there is cultural untranslatability (文化不可译) in translation. As far as translators are concerned, if they are aware that when the way of source language expressions make sense to target language speakers, he does literal translation; when the target language has no equivalent expressions, he puts the...