On Translation And Culture

Translation is the tie connecting the friendship of human beings and the bridge of mutual understanding of people from different countries. The purpose and characteristics of translation are to exchange ideas and culture. With the globalization of the world, the friendly visit between different countries is more often than any period of the history of mankind. The translation plays more and more important role. So, the research on translation gets further deepening day by day. And translation theorists begin to attempt to study the translation theory from different points of view.Chinese research on the translation theory has a long history with more than 1800 years, starting from the Buddhist scripture at the end of Han Dynasty. There are a substantial number of translation references and materials. Modern translation theory doesn't consider translation to be only the simple correspondence between two language signals and grammatical structures. It puts translation into the context of cross-culture and cross-disciplines, paying attention to the spread and acceptance of the translated text in the new culture context. Cultural concepts, which underlie the variety of language usage and language habits, now become the key area of translation studies.This article will analyze the close relation of language, culture and translation and will probe into the relation of culture and translation emphatically. And it points out that a lot of controversial questions of translation studies: translatability, literal translation and free translation, the standard of translation, etc. which are all closely related to cultural difference. The cultural difference not only leads to failures or misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication, but also poses the problem to translation theorists and translators. Translation involves language as well as culture.Approaches to cultures involved in translation may be divided into two methods: SL culture-oriented and TL culture-oriented. The author thinks that both methods may be justified in their own right and can supplement each other. Taking into consideration the styles, the need of reader and the intention of the translator, we can choose these two methods properly.