The Building Of The Third Culture And Translation

Translation Study has been turning its concentration on cultural perspectives since 1980s so as to research into the cultural origin of the Source Languages and their cultural backgrounds including political, economical, social and ideological aspects brought about by translation. In 1989, the International Translation Symposium held in Warwick University, U.K. saw a turn of Translation Study to Cultural Study. By the end of 1990s, the study of a wide range of cultural issues by the Translation Circle has become a heated subject. Chinese cultural research developed hand in hand with the international cultural research, but the focus of the study has long been the general cultural differences and cultural wording. In recent years, Chinese translation study endeavors to further its research on translation principles, translation processes and translation strategies based on the related theory in Linguistics, Pragmatics, Sociology and Semiology. Therefore, the cultural features of translation and its cross-cultural function have been stressed in Chinese translation studies. In view of such an atmosphere, this dissertation attempts to put forward a new idea: to build a special culture—the third culture, in the process of translation and takes it as an effective device connecting the source culture and the target culture.The origin of the third culture theory can be traced back to "the Cultural Turn" outlook brought about during the late 1980s. when Bassnett and Lefevere (1990) formally raised the idea " the Cultural Turn in translation" in their monograph Translation, History and Culture. They also published a series of works that further expounded their outlooks. In the process of the formation and development of Cultural School, translation theorists Lambert, Tymoczko and Cheyfitz also made great contribution to its development. Gentzler(2004), while commenting on the "Cultural Turn" by Bassnett and Lefevere, pointed out that translation studies has entered the stage of "Cultural Turn", and on the other hand , cultural study should also enter a stage of "Translation Turn" because the cultural study and Translation Study are indispensable.The third culture mode can be traced back to 1819, when German poet Johnann Wolfang von Goethe advanced "the third epoch" theory and made relative argumentation on it in this way: because the translators can only apply the First Culture (Cl) to express foreign cultures (C2), and at the same time they have to keep the original flavor, the emergence of a Third Culture (C3) is inevitable. Liu Miqing defined this viewpoint as "the Goethe Model", and thought that the Third Culture can make "an acculturated culture" by promoting and manipulating the target language. This thesis borrows the argumentation and advances that the building of the third culture mode can integrate the cultural studies and translation studies so that a new dimension of translation study can be built.With the development of intercultural communication and cross-cultural translation, the thesis also borrows the five-phase theory of the formation of the third culture advanced by Chen Guoming and puts the translation study into the realm of intercultural communication. This is no new hypothesis. Christiane Nord (1991) advanced that the term "translation" can be replaced by "intercultural communication" which revealed the close tie between culture and translation.This thesis still analyzes the inner relationship between the building of the Third Culture and translation practice, and further expounds the essential structure of the third culture. With the theoretical basis in the fields of Translation studies and cultural studies, the author tries to analyze the subjective and objective factors concerning the building of the third culture, and then puts forward the mode of building the third culture in the process of translation and finally discusses the specific application of the third culture mode in translation practice.