An Analysis Of Translation Of Moment In Peking From A Cultural Point Of View

Moment in Peking is written by Lin Yutang in English during his stay in Paris from 1938 to 1939. Both writer and novel are of typical Diaspora literature features. This English-version, also called the modern Dream of Red Mansion was translated into Chinese《京华烟云》by Zhang Zhenyu. This novel has won great popularity among Chinese readers and been made into two scenarios, which arouses many discussions upon the Chinese and western cultural clashes and translation problems. One of the most disputable problems is"cultural turn"in literary translation and writing and the way to translate the cultural elements in Diaspora literature following concerned translation theories.This thesis firstly summarizes the pros and cons of some of the major translation theories both in China and foreign countries, and introduces Frame Semantics of Charles Fillmore which could be used in explaining the translating of Diaspora literature. Fillmore has said that event frame reflected prototype effects and case frame reflected peripheral socio-cultural elements. After we abstract event frame and case frame from Diaspora literature and the ways to translate two frames, we will get a clue on how to deal with Diaspora literature. Secondly this thesis analyzes event frame and case frame in Moment in Peking and the methods Mr. Zhang Zhenyu used to translate the event frame and case frames. We can see it is easy to capture event frame in this novel, for the story happened in China. However, it's hard to translate case frame for various reasons. With reference to Nida's Dynamic equivalence theory which advocating the translator should try to make the source-cultural information in the source text understandable to the target reader in the target-cultural context, this thesis summarizes different translation cases in Diaspora literature under socio-cultural influences. This thesis also introduces another form of translation of Moment in Peking: two soap operas adapting from Moment in Peking. Sharing the same event frame, these two soap operas differ greatly under the influence of case frame,which again justifying the feasibility of Charles Fillmore. Lastly, this thesis concludes the trans-national cultural influence on the literary translation theory and the drawbacks of cultural research in translation. It enriches the research of culture and translation of culture study and gives the suggestions on the development of cultural research in translation.