On The Transformation Of Cultural Images In The C-E/E-C Proverb Translation

Proverb is a fixed sentence with relatively complete semantic. Once used, it can be taken as a componential part of a sentence and an individual communicative unit to express complete ideas. Proverb reflects people's knowledge towards natural society, mankind's life, social phenomenon, history, geography and so on. The most outstanding characteristic of it is to express rich experience which the masses accumulate in production, daily life and all kinds of social activities, radiating sparks of people's wisdom. It also conveys people's mind, thinking and culture as a cherished heritage of humankind's culture,otherwise, it has rich cultural connotations, acted as the essence of national language and culture. Cultural images are contained in many proverbs with strong cultural color. In fact, every cultural image in a proverb represents a kind of culture. Translation is not only the transformation of language, but cultural information. The content of it comes from culture. It's very crucial to successfully transform cultural images in the C-E/E-C proverb translation. The thesis discusses the problem of the transformation of cultural images in the C-E/E-C proverb translation from the perspective of cultural view on translation. It aims to solve two problems: (1) what are the reasons of cultural image's transformation in the C-E/E-C proverb translation? (2) How is cultural image's transformation carried on in the C-E/E-C proverb translation?The thesis takes the qualitative analysis and its theoretical basis is cultural view on translation. In the 1980s of the twentieth century, English translation theorist, Susan Bassnett proposed that the method of translation studies must transform the unit of translation from texts accepted by people to cultural turn. The followings are concrete implications of cultural view on translation: firstly, translation must take culture as the unit of translation, not remaining on the level of text; secondly, translation is not only a simple process from decoding to reconstructing, but also a kind of communicative action; thirdly, translation mustn't be confined to the description of the source language's text, but the text's functional equivalence in the target culture; fourthly, translation has different principles and standards in order to meet different needs in different historic periods, and translation is to meet cultural needs and different groups'needs in a certain culture.In view of the above theoretical viewpoints, the thesis analyzes reasons of cultural image's transformation in the C-E/E-C proverb translation from five facets of cultural correspondence, cultural inclusion, cultural conflict, cultural vacancy and cultural intercourse and discusses specific methods to transform cultural images from the above every aspect. The thesis adopts five methods to shift cultural images: to reproduce the image, to replace the image, to add the image, to delete the image and to interpret the image. It takes a lot of case studies to expound which methods are used one after another and that it adopts the method to reproduce the image in case of cultural correspondence; to reproduce the image, to replace the image, to interpret the image, to add the image or delete the image in case of cultural inclusion; to replace the image in case of cultural conflict; to replace the image, to interpret the image, to add the image or delete the image in case of cultural vacancy; to reproduce the image or to replace the image in case of cultural intercourse.