Cultural Levels And Transfer Of Cultural Values In The English Translation Of Fengshen Yanyi

Cultural value in translation has become one of the focuses in translation studies since 1980s with the establishment of "human-centered paradigm" in scientific research and the emergence of Cultural School in translation theory study. From then on, translation has no longer been regarded as a static and pure linguistic action, but a communication process under certain social cultural background. Translation studies become more profound with the cultural awareness and the establishing of cultural perspective in translation activities. A lot of important achievements in cultural translation emerged, forming the significant "cultural turn". However, many works on cultural translation mainly discuss translation in a general manner and neglect the study of culture itself. The result is that it hinders further development of the study of cultural translation both in theory and practice.Therefore, this thesis starts from the study of culture itself. It introduces the concepts, such as "foreign cultural marker", "cultural value" and "cultural level" first. Then it divides culture into three levels (surface, middle and deep level) according to the three relationships-the relationship between human and nature; the relationship between human and society; and the relationship between human and himself. Different kinds of cultural markers are put into different cultural levels.With the division of culture levels, on the one hand, we can examine cultural meaning in a macroscopic perspective, and on the other hand we can analyze the inner patterns of cultural meaning in a microscopic perspective. To Chinese classical works which contain profound cultural information, the division of cultural levels is especially helpful to study the relationship between different culture levels and the transfer of culture values.Therefore, based on the division of culture levels, this thesis chooses the supernatural evil-spirit novel Fengshen Yanyi in Ming dynasty as the object to study how cultural values are transferred on different culture levels in its English version.Fengshen Yanyi contains abundant cultural information and has a profound local color. The unique Chinese cultural values, ethics, customs and religious beliefs are all reflected in the novel. Thus it is hard for English people to understand. Therefore, to transfer the cultural information in the novel completely and accurately is significant to advocating Chinese culture and carrying on communication between China and western countries.This thesis makes a survey of the features that the English translation of Fengshen Yanyi has in transferring cultural values on different cultural levels. It finally points out that the English translation of Fengshen Yanyi fulfills the task of cultural communication effectively in a macroscopic view and obeys the rules for transferring cultural values in a microscopic view.