Cultural Vacancy And Contextual Dynamic Adaptation

The recent twenty years have witnessed an obvious tendency in the translation study that translation is defined as the cross-cultural communication. Increasing importance, hence, is attached to cultural translation by the translators, naturally, to the cultural issues in metaphor. Metaphor, basically regarded as a cognitive phenomenon and a thinking mode, is cultural-loaded linguistic symbol, carrying specific cultural information. Metaphor translation involves not only the transfer of language, but also the transmission of culture owing to differences in living environment, geographical conditions, social customs, religious beliefs, historical and literary allusions and modes of thinking, etc., which results inevitably in cultural vacancy. This thesis tentatively explores the effective methods of handling cultural vacancy in metaphor translation by virtue of the Adaptation Theory.Cultural vacancy is defined as the absence of relevant background knowledge shared by the writer and his intended readers and the extreme embodiment of the cultural heterogeneity. In terms of metaphor translation, a dynamic interpretation of cultural vacancy plays an essential role in any successful communicative rendition and the facilitation of cultural interaction between countries since cultural vacancy is an obstacle to effective communication.To interpret cultural vacancy in a dynamic way, the author adopts the Adaptation Theory because Verschueren assumes language use to be a continuous making of linguistic choices with difference of salience for the purpose of adaptation and because translation, a special form of language use, is a cross-cultural communication. According to the Adaptation Theory, using language consists in the continuous making of linguistic choices on account of three hierarchically related qualities of language: variability, negotiability and adaptability. The linguistic choices should be interadaptable with four aspects. In accordance with contextual correlates of adaptability, the translator should adapt to target readers' physical world, social world and mental world. Structural objects of adaptability show that linguistic choices involve the choice-making of languages, codes and styles. According to the dynamics of adaptability, the translator should adapt to target readers' temporal, contextual and language structural dimensions. From the salience of adaptation process, a translator should neglect neither "cognition" nor "society", i.e. adapt to "mind in society". The author, based on the Adaptation Theory, maintains that the process of dealing with the problem of cultural vacancy in metaphor translation is a dynamic process of choice making and adaptation. When confronted with cultural vacancy in metaphor translation the translator may have enormous potential choices due to the variability and negotiability of language and then make proper translation choices in accordance with the adaptation to communicative contexts of the target readers as well as the different linguistic norms. Then, the author proceeds with the further study on cultural vacancy in metaphor translation in terms of its classification, its causation in conjunction with its translatability, which lays a sound foundation for the Adaptation Theory to handle cultural vacancy in metaphor translation. Therefore, the cultural vacancy in metaphor translation in A Dream of Red Mansions is mainly analyzed in much detail from extra-linguistic context respectively: physical condition, social context, and psychological motivation. Eventually, some concrete translation strategies are brought forward and illustrated with examples.From the research, we found that the vacant image of metaphor in most cases plays a dominant role in the translation strategies adopted to handle the problem of cultural vacancy in metaphor translation. The translator strives to retain the original yet vacant image by directly transferring the original image to the target culture or adding extra explanation to the original image. But when the same image in the different cultures conveys conflicting connotations, or when the image is beyond the reader's ability, the translator may make an adaptation to the social and mental contexts of the target readers by replacing the original image with target image or abandoning the original image of the metaphor. Every translation strategy would be justified as long as it tackled effectively cultural vacancy to transmit culture in a constructive way.