Influence Of Local Culture On Translation Choice-A Descriptive Study Of The Translation And Publication Of Foreign Books From 2001 To 2006 In China

The theoretical background of this research is cultural turn in translation studies. In the past 2000 years, translation studies have always focused on the issue of how to translate; while from the 1950s, translation studies in the west began to pay more attention to studying translation from the culture level, instead of the pure linguistic level concern. The "cultural turn" in translation studies has become a new perspective to study translation. It asserts that translation studies should deal with the problem of what translation does and why translation does so from the cultural perspective. Therefore, this thesis will discuss the influence of culture on translation choice from the perspective of the publication of translated foreign books.In the early 21st century, a wealth of foreign books are translated and published in China. This research investigates the translated foreign books published by two domestic representative and authoritative publishing houses in China, YiLin Press and Shanghai Translation Press from the year 2001 to 2006, in order to get a general view to the trend of translation choice in Chinese translation circle at present. The author collected data from two aspects: source countries and subjects of the translated books. The statistics show that most of the source books come from U.S. and U.K., and most of the rest come from Germany, France, Russia, Italy and Japan. The third world countries also cover a small percentage of the source countries. As for the subjects, most of the books belong to the categories of literature children's literature, philosophy and religion, social science. Translations of books on natural science, economics, art and law also occupy a small percentage. This thesis is a descriptive study on these translation phenomena, including the resultof translations of foreign books and the culture factors which affect translation choice. And some comments are made following the description. In order to make the research more scientific and objective, the author mainly pays attention to the culture factors in a broad sense hiding behind the translation choice. According to the classification and definition of different culture factors in the theory of culture turn in translation studies, the author makes a detailed and further illustration and analysis of the influence of culture factors on translation choice, including politics, ideology, economy, culture in a narrow sense and culture position. The analysis shows that translation choice is affected by culture factors to a great extent.