Cultural Vacancy And Its Translation

Language, as an important component of the cultural system, reflects and transmits culture. Different languages mirror different cultural characteristics, which are reflected in the most vivid and concentrated form in the cultural vacancy between different languages. According to Susan Bassnett, "In the same way that the surgeon, operating on the heart, cannot neglect the body that surrounds it, so the translator treats the text in isolation from culture at his peril." (Susan, 1980: 56) Thus, translation is not only the transformation between two languages, but also the communication between two cultures, which requires the translators to be not only bilingual, but bicultural as well.Cultural connotations of a language are very abundant, consisting of national psychology, traditional customs, religious beliefs and social and natural factors. "What is excellent for one language culture does not fit easily into the patterns of other cultures." (张经浩, 2000/5) As cultural vacancy is determined by the particularities of two cultures, some linguistic or cultural items exist in one language but are completely absent in another, which cause a vacuum of sense and experience in the TL reader's mind. Consequently, translators find once in a while that cultural information in the source language is extremely hard to be understood by the target language, let alone to be transferred into the target language. The very existence of cultural vacancy brings difficulties to translators and greatly challenges the translation of cultural-bound expressions.Many translation theorists have devoted themselves to the study of the translation of cultural vacancy. In the late 1980s, the Russian translation theorist I. Q. Sorokin, together with others, put forward the theory of "cultural vacancy" in discussing language and its national cultural characters as "Cultural vacancy is the elements in the source language, which are not understandable or easy to be misunderstood by the target language readers." The author of this thesis has her own definition of cultural vacancy as well. Cultural vacancy is the items in the source language, which are not understandable or easy to be misunderstood for the target language readers, due to cultural differences in historical background, social customs, religious beliefs, ideology, etc. Therefore, cultural vacancy undoubtedly brings forth obstacles in the course of translating; it is of great importance of make a theoretical study on cultural vacancy, together with its definition, classifications, causes leading to it and strategies to deal with it.Hong Lou Meng (hereinafter referred to as HLM) is considered as an encyclopaedia of Chinese culture and there are many cultural vacancy items in it, since it depicts many aspects of Chinese feudal culture: poetry, opera, calligraphy, painting, medicine, drama, official system, folk-custom, name, clothing, food, tea, drink, games, family tradition, ceremonies and so on. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, masters in translation, successfully translated A Dream of Red Mansions, which is considered as one of the best translation works of HLM. Thus, it is more convincing for us to take their translated version as illustrations to probe into cultural vacancy.The whole thesis is divided into three chapters:Chapter 1 focuses on theoretical study on cultural vacancy, together with the reason why the author chooses HLM as the case study and the significance of the study on cultural vacancy.Chapter 2 studies on barriers aroused from cultural vacancy, providing with convincing illustrations from HLM.Chapter 3 puts forth ten translation strategies to deal with cultural vacancy, and each is provided a definition and corresponding illustrations taken from A Dream of Red Mansions in areas like traditional Chinese Imperial Examination System, Chinese official titles, traditional customs, religious beliefs and historical allusions.The last part of this thesis is the conclusion, which emphasis the importance of the strategies to deal with cultural vacancy in the context of cross-cultural communication.