A Cultural Approach To Mistranslation

On the one hand, language, being an intrinsic part of culture, carries culture, mirrors culture, spreads culture and helps develop culture. On the other hand, language is deeply rooted in culture. As a visible form of cultural content, language, in turn, is influenced and shaped by culture. Consequently, as a transfer of languages, translation is not merely considered as an interpretation of verbal signs, but also as a cultural transplantation. There are various kinds of errors or mistakes produced during the course of translation. Some mistranslations belong to the linguistic level; however, what is discussed in this paper is the cultural mistranslation, which refers to a kind of cultural defects or rewriting made by translation, rather than a simple mistake or error in translation. In this thesis, cultural approach is used to analyze cultural mistranslation phenomenon in order to introduce micro-cultural perspective and macro-cultural perspective in interpretation of this mistranslation problem. Since the cultural mistranslation further falls into the unintentional mistranslation and intentional mistranslation, the analysis can be categorized to three parts: the origin study, the case study, and the significance study. The origin of unintentional cultural mistranslation can be analyzed from linguistic approach and hermeneutic approach; however, interpretation of cultural mistranslation from the micro-cultural approach, by contrast, is more convincing than that of linguistics and hermeneutics. Furthermore, the origin of intentional cultural mistranslation can be analyzed from the macro-cultural perspective, which adopts parts of the theory put forward by the school of"culture translation studies". The intentional cultural mistranslation can even be regarded as a kind of rewriting manipulated by both ideology and poetics a translator has to follow. Translations do not take place in a vacuum, so any kind of intentional distortion is for the purpose of serving for the dominant demands.To sum up, the present thesis tries to redefine the proper role and significance of cultural mistranslation in the field of translation study, hoping to complement traditional understanding of this phenomenon. The present paper not only attempts to realize a shift from the overwhelming standard of source text to the subjectivity of the translator, and from the source culture to the target culture, but also hopes to elevate the place of the cultural approach that is the mixture of Chinese empirical translation theory with the Western rational theory of"cultural translation studies"in the study of translation theory.