The Cultivation Of A Translator's Culture Awareness

This paper presents a study of the importance of a translator's culture awareness in cultural translation, a subject much concerned by scholars and English teachers both at home and abroad. For the convenience of elaboration, the discussion in this paper is limited to one specific problem in cultural translation: the "culture bumps in a word's associative meaning". By introducing the concept of culture awareness into the discussion of this specific problem, the present paper aims at looking for a new and feasible way to help college students overcome this difficulty in their translation practice. With some analysis and reasoning, the author finally shows the thesis that raising a translator's culture awareness is an effective way to solve a common problem in translation-- "culture bumps in a word's associative meaning".This paper starts with the introduction of a phenomenon in translation: The culture bump in the associative meaning hinders the college students from translating properly. Then, after a brief analysis of the traditional translation strategies, the author tries to study this problem from a new angle and proceeds to present her hypothesis that raising a translator's culture awareness is an effective solution to the translation of "culture bumps in a word's associative meaning". This hypothesis is raised through step-by-step analysis and is tested by both theoretical evidence and experimental data. What's more, the author also puts forward effective and feasible ways to implement the hypothesis and further her study. These ways include analyzing words with different cultural connotations, introducing reading materials on culture and conducting cross-cultural comparison, group discussion, and affection nurturing. It is hoped that this way of research will serve as the foundation for future studies similar in nature.After a wide range of research, the author finally shows the significance of cultivating a translator's culture awareness in cultural translation, especially in the translation of "culture bumps in a word's associative meaning".In conclusion this paper suggests that a translator's culture awareness plays an important role in cultural translation. Such a problem is worth studying and the findings are especially valuable to teachers who concentrate on the teaching of translation. The author of the paper recommends that teachers should put special emphasis on the cultivation of their students' culture awareness which enables them to make a free choice of translation methods according to different purposes of translation and different target readers, rather than instill rigid translation strategies into the students' mind.