Cultural Transfer: A Comparative Study On Translations Of Culture-loaded Words In The Art Of War

The Art of War is the most famous military masterpiece in ancient China, so it has drawn much attention of translators. Among various English versions of The Art of War, the sinologist Lionel Giles' (1875-1958) and the contemporary Chinese translator Lin Wusun's are more influential versions.As Bassnett (1990:8) proposed, translation unit will be culture and the translation from one culture into another is intercultural translation. Therefore, the aim of translation is to make the target text function in the same way that the source text does in the source culture. According to Nida (1964:172), translators should focus on the target reader's response in order to produce the impact of the source text. From the linguistic perspective, culture-loaded words can be generally classified into two categories: culture-loaded words without corresponding conceptual meanings in the target culture and words without associate meanings in the target culture. The paper first analyzes the translations of culture-loaded words in Giles' and Lin Wusun's English versions. And then, author evaluates the cultural transfer in the translations of cultural words with focus on the cultural functional equivalence and the acceptability on the part of readers. The comparative study on the cultural transfer shows the obvious differences of the two translators: Lin Wusun transferred more cultural information into the target culture in his translation. Especially, he tried his best to preserve the original meanings of culture-loaded words without equivalent concepts in the target culture. However, Giles tended to substitute this kind of culture-loaded words with the existing concepts in English culture, which obviously led to the loss of meaning or even caused the distortion of meaning. In translating the culture-loaded words without corresponding associate meanings, Lin preferred to translate them literally with notes to keep the cultural connotation but at the same time to make target text readers understand them; likewise, Giles translated them literally but he didn't add notes. As a result, his translations could be difficult for target text readers to appreciate the rhetoric function of culture-loaded words in the target culture and thus led to the cultural functional absence.Cultural transfer means the transference of cultural meaning, and there is no blinking the fact that a translator is likely to be influenced by his own cultural mode in the process of translation. The negative transfer refers to the cultural interference caused by cultural differences. It shows that translators apply unconsciously the mode of his native culture to the source culture in translation. Because of the negative transfer, the original meaning of the source text is lost or distorted. As a result, target text readers may misunderstand the original text. However, the causes of negative cultural transfer of western translators differ from that of Chinese translators. According to Hermeneutics, interpretation is " never the comprehension without preconditions of the things presented before us (Heidegger, 1962: 191)." Instead, it is always constructed on the basis of the fore-structure of understanding, consisting of fore-having, fore-sight, and fore conception. Because of the different cultural and social background, Giles transferred his own native cultural modes to the target culture when translating culture-specific words while Lin's negative transfer is because of his neglect of the historical meaning of culture-loaded words. That is to say, the ancient meanings of culture-loaded words are different from the present meanings in modern Chinese. The diachronic change within the intra-lingual system is likely to make translators misunderstand the original meaning of culture-loaded words. In fact, the negative transfer of the two English translations is partially caused by the fact that double translation is involved. The translation of Chinese classics involves two processes, the intra-lingual translation of Chinese Classics and inter-lingual translation. At last the functionalism, the Skopostheorie, is applied to explain the reasons of the negative cultural transfer. Translator's purpose determines translator's strategies. Both Giles and Lin Wusun made detailed notes, but their notes focused on different aspects. Giles' notes were mainly to explain Sun Tzu's military ideas so he paid little attention to the translation of certain culture-specific words. On the contrary, Lin wanted to present to the world readers the authentic Chinese culture through The Art of War, so he preserved the most of native cultural background in his notes.In the end, the author offered the solutions to the problems of negative transfer and made of point of the necessity of setting general rules in translating cultural words, and adding explanatory notes.