Degree Of Translatability In Explicit And Implicit Cultures

With the cultural shift in the translation study, this thesis tries to explore the different effects that the explicit and implicit cultural patterns have on the degree of translatability. It takes the classification of explicit and implicit cultural patterns as research background and demonstrates the existence of the degree of translatability from the perspective of the translator and the reader. By analyzing two English translation versions of The True Story of Ah Q, the author works out a translation methodology for the explicit and implicit cultural information respectively. This thesis is composed of five chapters.The first chapter briefly introduces the cultural shift in the translation study as well as the research scope and methods of this thesis. The second chapter works out the definition of the culture of this study based on the review and analysis of the existing definitions. This chapter illustrates the explicit and implicit cultural differences between Chinese and English by examples. The third chapter analyzes the theoretical essentials and characteristics of the degree of translatability and explores the different degrees of translatability in explicit and implicit cultures from the perspectives of both the translator and the reader. The fourth chapter puts forward different translation methods for explicit and implicit cultures by comparing two different English translation versions of The True Story of Ah Q. The fifth chapter summarizes the findings and limitations of this thesis.Based on the above chapters, this thesis has arrived at the following conclusions: (1) The culture should be studied from the perspective of explicit and implicit patterns. (2) The essential problem is the one of the degree of translatability which is higher in the explicit culture than in the implicit culture. (3) The two English translation versions of The True Story of Ah Q provide affluent examples for a contrastive study of the translation methodology for explicit and implicit cultures: (1) When there is no equivalence in the target text, the foreignization method can be used to translate the easy-to-understand cultural information. (2) For the more complicated explicit cultural information closer to the implicit culture, the domestication method can be adopted. There are two levels in this category: "domestication with notes" (to provide the background information to help readers to understand the text) and "transliteration" (if necessary, with notes). For the translation of implicit cultural information, there are three categories of methods. (1) If there are equivalences between the source text and the target text, there is the metaphrase method. (2) When there is no equivalence in the target text, there is the paraphrase method to deal with the cultural information that can be explained with a few words. (3) If the cultural information is more complicated or unfamiliar to the target reader, there is the method of translation with notes.